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THE STARS OF GOD 



BY 



/ 

E. FITCH BURR, D. D., LL. D. 



AUTHOR OF 

ECCE CCELUM, PATER MUNDI, AD FIDEM, ETC. 



" WHEN I CONSIDER THY HEAVENS." 



X^ { OF co^Jv. 



HARTFORD. : 
THE STUDENT PUBLISHING COMPANY 

j 896. 



Copyrighted 1895. 

BY 

Chakles A. Piddock. 









CONTENTS. 



The Earth, 
The Moon, 

The Sun, 

The Solar Family, I. 



RESEMBLANCES— DIFFERENCES— ANTIQUITY. 

The Solar Family, II. 69 

FUTURE— HARMONY— HISTORY. 

The Solar Family, III 83 

SUPERSTITIONS. 

The Solar Family, IV. 99 

INHABITANTS? 

Other Solar Families, I in 

CREDIBLE— MANY— DISTANT. 

Other Solar Families, II 127 

SIZE— UNITIES. 

Other Solar Families, III. . . . .143 

other unities. 

Other Solar Families, IV. .... 161 

unanswered questions. 

Solar Communities, I. 173. 

knots— hamlets— towns— villages. 

Solar Communities, II. ..... 191 

PROVINCES— CITIES. 

Solar Communities, III. , 205 

STATES— EMPIRES. 

Solar Communities, IV. 217 

SPECIMEN EMPIRE. 

Solar Communities, V. 231 

federated empires. 

Astronomical Religion, 1 243 

reality of god— his unity— his personal greatness. 
Astronomical Religion, II. .... 265 

HIS VAST EMPIRE— IMMENSE ACTIVITY— LOVE OF LAW AND 
ORDER— MORAL AND PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT.^ 



3 
19 
39 

55 



I. 

THE EARTH 



THE EARTH. 



THE EARTH. 

The earth is naturally the first round of the 
ladder by which our knowledge climbs toward 
the astronomical summits of the universe. 

So let us begin at home — as our charities and 
duties and travels are compelled to do — that is, at 
the star that lies nearest to us, the star that is so 
near that it cannot be nearer, the star on which 
we live. 

For the earth is a star. This assertion would 
have astonished the ancients. And to not a few 
in our own times it is "a hard saying — who can 
hear it ? What ! this great, dull outspread of 
plains and mountains and waters like the bright 
points that spangle the evening vault ! It cannot 
be. Our senses protest." And yet if we could be 
freed from the chains of gravity and go away 
indefinitely from the earth we should find its 
surface gradually contracting and levelling and 
brightening on our sight until at last it, too, would 
appear as a bright point on the sky surrounded on 
all sides by vacancy — in all respects one of the 



4 THE STARS OF GOD. 

great sisterhood of stars that make the glory of 
our nights. 

Our earth is not only a star, but is by far the 
most interesting and important to us of all the 
stars. This is saying too much to suit some, and 
too little to suit others. For our earth has extrav- 
agant admirers — also extravagant revilers. Some 
can hardly say too much for it, and some can 
hardly say too much against it. Some are dis- 
posed to worship it, and some to crucify it. Some 
have no other deity than earthly things and serve 
them devotedly all their lives, though without 
the formality of altar and prayers ; while to others 
the world is a mud-monster, denied and defiling — 
a sort of reptilian devil to be loathed and fought 
to the utmost. These extremes must settle their 
quarrel between themselves. We can side with 
neither. We cannot stand with the idolaters ; nor 
can we stand with the hermits of the Thebaid to 
whom the world was the sum of all villainies and 
dangers. But we can go so far as to say that no 
other star, in the whole broad heaven, has any- 
thing like the interest and value to us which our 
own star possesses. 

It is our cradle, our workshop, and our grave. 
Of its substance our bodies are made. From its 
maternal bosom we get our living, and indeed all 



THE EARTH. 5 

the materials of our comfort and civilization. On 
it we pass our entire probation as moral beings. 
And on it took place the incarnation, the atone- 
ment, and the manifold miracles recorded in our 
Scriptures — events great enough to consecrate 
and glorify any world. It furnishes our astronom- 
ical instruments, the place on which to plant 
them, the observers to use them, the mathematics 
and elementary knowledge of matter to empower 
them. It supplies the primary school which 
teaches us all we know about the nature and laws 
of matter — showing us that it consists of many 
kinds and that all its kinds, under all circum- 
stances, are subject to one law of mutual attrac- 
tion which can be used with enormous effect in 
explaining the distant heavens. The earth really 
supplies the alphabet from which we construct our 
astronomy : not only supplies the elementary as- 
tronomical letters, but largely puts them together 
into syllables and words and intelligible sentences. 

Just as it is more important for a man to know ■ 
well his own country than it is to know well a 
foreign country, so it is more important for us to 
be well acquainted with our own star than it is to 
be well acquainted with any other star in all the 
radiant heavens. 



6 THE STARS OF GOD. 

"What do we know about this, to us, the most in- 
teresting and important of all the stars ? Very 
much indeed. Almost infinitely more than we 
know of any other star. Once it was not so. Xot 
so very far back, the earth to human ken was 
almost a sealed book — let us venture to say a book 
sealed with seven seals, though written within and 
on the backside. But that time is well past. Men 
became inquisitive. Since the earth was nearest 
to. them of all the stars ; since indeed it was that 
on which they dwelt, on which they could move 
about freely, and on which they could bring all 
their senses to bear in closest observation — what a 
fine field for successful inquisitiveness ! So they 
began to use to some purpose the most wonderful 
instruments of investigation known among men, 
viz., their own eyes, ears, hands, feet, brains ; 
gradually supplementing these with hammers and 
spades and crucibles and batteries and laboratories 
and calculuses and optical instruments and steam- 
ships and railways. Many ran to and fro and 
knowledge was increased. Satan is not the only 
observer whose business it is to go to and fro in 
the earth, and walk up and down in it. The world 
has been ransacked. Floods of travel and investi- 
gation have swept over nearly all lands. We have 
gone down into valleys, we have scaled mountains, 



THE EARTH. 7 

we have crossed oceans ; the general features of 
the world are thoroughly understood, and details 
to an enormous amount. Whole libraries are 
needed to express them. They could not be told 
in years though we had ' a brazen throat and a 
hundred iron tongues.' They have been digested 
into so many sciences that not single mind can 
master them all. As much cannot be said of our 
knowledge of the distant heavens. One may 
know it all and still be no prodigy. We shall 
never know another star as well as we do our own 

— until ! 

Not that our knowledge of the earth is anything 
like exhaustive. There is reason to suspect that 
what is known of our star is only a small part of 
what there is to be known. We have only begun 
to know the world. As yet we have scarcely 
done more than skim the surface of things. Our 
inquiries, like far-flying birds, have only alighted 
here and there on wide stretches of country. 
Africa, the tw T o Arctics, and the ocean-depths con- 
tain many a secret. So does the most familiar 
land the sun shines on ; and indeed the most 
familiar single object about us. No slightest 
thing within our reach can be considered as per- 
fectly understood. Scores of questions can be 
asked to which no answers are given or promised. 



8 THE STARS OF GOD. 

The Sphinx has many a riddle to read us out of 
her earth-book which we cannot solve though we 
die for it. 

And, not only is our knowledge of the earth in- 
complete but we are very far from having gone 
the length of our tether. Who imagines that we 
know about the earth all we can know, or are 
likely to know ? Who imagines that we have 
almost sighted the shore of our ocean — as we see 
it to day ? Our ignorance has the glow of morning 
on its face. Nature's promises are almost as 
plentiful as its problems. Mysteries are ever un- 
folding about us, like the buds of advancing 
spring. Every science relating to the earth is 
under marching orders ; and the orders are not 
to retreat but to advance. "Forward. March ! — 
there is yet much land to be possessed " — is in the 
mouths of all the captains and inscribed on all the 
banners. And hardly a year passes without ad- 
vancing the outposts. New sciences are starting 
up while others are starting forward. Among 
them all, daily discoveries are the order of the 
day. All over the world the Pillars of Hercules, 
the Land's End, and Ultima Thule are being put 
to flight. Cloistered places are becoming public 
parks. It seems as if in the matter of knowledge 
of the earth the little fingers of the future will be 



THE EARTH. 9 

thicker than the loins of the present. It is better 
to be in a slough of Despond than to have a slough 
of Despond in us. Neither of these unpleasant 
conditions belongs to the present generation of 
scientists. We are all full of cheerful expectation. 

Of course there is an element of uncertainty in 
such an outlook on our future. Divine predictions 
always come true : human predictions often fail 
though made by Magi. We have occasion to re- 
member that there is many a slip between the cup 
and the lip ; that knowledge, like other things, 
has a way of ebbing as well as flowing ; that 
sciences as well as scientists, have been known to 
backslide. But the past is sure. The knowledge 
we have gained about the earth we can count upon. 
So, we will turn from pleasant dreams of what 
will be to sober consideration of the facts already 
in hand. 

For much knowledge of our own star we are in- 
debted to the same instruments that have given us 
most of our knowledge of the distant heavens, 
viz., our optical instruments and our mathematics 
— the right and left hands of our astronomy. 
Working together these have given us all our 
accurate geography. We have now determined 
with great exactness the latitudes and longitudes 
of all the more important points of the earth : we 



io THE STARS OF GOD. 

have also, by the same means and by soundings 
gained a clear idea of the great ocean beds. Every 
civilized nation has provided charts of its own 
coasts so accurately made that they represent the 
outline of the land and the neighboring sea-bottom 
with almost the fidelity of a Dutch portrait or of a 
photograph. This has been done in connection 
with a system of triangulation in which the tele- 
scope and its adjuncts play a conspicuous part. 
The coaster and fisherman as they feel their way 
safely among the shoals and sunken rocks may 
thank for their safety, not their stars indeed, but 
the same instrument that has done the most at 
exploring the stars. 

The telescope is also the condition of all ex- 
tensive ocean- voyaging. The coast surveys pro- 
vide for the convenience and safety of navigation 
along certain shores ; but if we are to have that 
knowledge of the wide earth that comes from im- 
mense commerce and travel, means must be fur- 
nished for passing over the trackless oceans freely 
and safely in every direction. In order to do this, 
the sailor must be able to find his exact place on 
the deep at any moment. And it is not enough 
for him to consult his dead reckoning and chro- 
nometer ; he must verify these by observing 
certain heavenly bodies and by consulting the 



THE EARTH. n 

famous Nautical Almanac, which is, in some sort, 
the sailor's Bible, doing for him on the natural 
deep what the Bible offers to do on the spiritual 
deeps. The foundations of the Nautical Almanac 
are the Greenwich Observatory, the telescope, and 
the theory of gravitation. These are what we 
come to if we dig down to the very bottom of 
things, and ask how that indispensible companion 
of every long voyage is made. Astronomy hides 
behind every page of this vadc mecum which has 
made the deep comparatively safe, and gradually 
covered it with inquisitive traffickers and travelers 
into all lands, and so been the means of a vast 
accession to our knowledge of the earth. What 
crowded maps and bulky geographies are now on 
the tables of our scholars and even on the desks of 
the common school ? A thoughtful man sees the 
shadow of a telescope in the background and 
between the lines of every one of them. That our 
little children know more of the world on which 
they live than did the sages of antiquity is due to 
the fact that the optic tube, pointed at the sky, 
has discovered more facts on the earth than it has 
done in the heavens. 

In the case of all other stars there is no diffi- 
culty in telling all we know about them — the 
known facts are so few. But what we know about 



12 THE STARS OF GOD. 

the earth is so prodigiously much that if we would 
have any space left for telling of other stars we 
must narrow our view to a few general features 
like those which come under notice in the case of 
the other stars — such as shape, and size, and situ- 
ation, and motions. 

We find that the ancients were mistaken in 
thinking that the earth is a rough plain indefi- 
nitely extended, resting on solid supports, in the 
centre of the universe, without motion itself but 
revolved about by all the heavens. All this is 
now denied and defied. We know that the earth 
is globular in form. We know that it has no 
elephant and immense tortoise to rest upon but is 
altogether unsupported amid the vacancies of 
space — literally "hung on nothing." And we 
know that instead of being forever at rest it is 
forever in motion after a most astonishing fash- 
ion ; and that, so far from being the great central 
heart of the creation about which all things are 
framed and to which all things have respect as the 
seat of honor and control and destiny, it is almost 
infinitely otherwise. We are sorry to have to 
charge such great mistakes on the fathers. But 
they are not without excuse. It is unreasonable 
to ask men to see as well at dawn as at noon. 
The shadows of the night are bound to retire 



THE EARTH. 13 

gradually. We ourselves are often misled by first 
seemings just as the fathers were. 

We are largely indebted to the telescope for all 
our precise and minute knowledge of the shape 
and size of the earth. Its general roundness is 
known by other means (men who have sailed or 
railroaded round the world need no other proof), 
but we have to use the telescope with its ap- 
pliances in order to know that we do not live on a 
proper globe, but on one that is somewhat flattened 
on opposite sides ; and also to know what are the 
exact values of the longest and shortest diameter. 
This knowledge is best gained by measuring arcs 
of a meridian in various parts of the world ; and 
telescopes have been indispensable to such meas- 
urements. By these it has been found that our 
extremes of diameter differ by about twenty-six 
miles while our mean diameter is 7912 miles. 

This spheroidal star turns around on its shortest 
diameter once in twenty-four hours, without the 
least noise or jar, carrying us with a perfectly uni- 
form motion through space at the rate of a 
thousand miles an hour, and making the whole 
heavens seem to revolve about us daily. In addi- 
tion, the earth wheels about the sun once a year — 
which means that while we are being carried 
round the earth at a thousand miles an hour we 



14 THE STARS OF GOD. 

are also being carried about the sun at more than 
sixty times that rate. It almost makes one dizzy to 
think of such complicate and tremendous veloci- 
ties. Perhaps we feel an instinctive prompting to 
grasp at something. Perhaps we seem to be losing 
our breath — if our imaginations are very alert. 
But we are safe. Mother earth clasps her children 
mightily to her bosom as she flies. She is careful 
to carry with us in our double motion the atmos- 
phere and all our surroundings without disturbing 
in the least their relative positions ; and to shoot 
along as softly and silently and smoothly as she 
does swiftly. Were it not for this we should find 
our rushing somersaults and gyrations through 
space anything but comfortable. As it is, not a 
hint of our break-neck journeying comes directly 
to our senses. We have to infer it distantly but 
conclusively from the fact that such journeying 
furnishes the simplest and a perfect explanation of 
the daily and yearly changes observed in the sky. 
By its double motion our star becomes a grand 
observatory from which to study the other stars. 
Our common observatories are fixtures. Once 
built they stand on the same spot as long as they 
stand at all. If they were only easily transferable 
from one point of the earth to anoher — could be 
cheaply and smoothly spirited away from Green- 



THE EARTH. 15 

wich to Cape Town or Quito or, better still, to 
a point some hundreds of millions of miles nearer 
the heavenly bodies than we now are, it would 
sometimes be a great convenience. Well, this is 
done b)' means of that underlying observatory 
that we call the earth. This is the great celestial 
lookout. 

Bv its rounded form and transparent atmosphere 
and position among the stars it gives us a grand 
outlook on the populous heavens. By turning on 
its axis it brings successively into view all parts of 
the sky ; whereas without this rotation we could 
see only a single hemisphere, except by travelling 
half round the globe. By its movement about the 
sun it brings us nearly 200 millions of miles nearer 
some of the stars than we should be without this 
motion, and so enables us to discover important 
facts not otherwise obtainable. And then this trav- 
elling observatory of ours, ponderous and granite- 
built as it is, moves so smoothly and quickly from 
place to place that no senses nor instruments, how- 
ever delicate, can detect the slightest disturbance. 
It is so stoutly built of endless "munitions of 
rocks" that we have done our best at describino- 
firmness and stability in a thing when we have 
likened it to the foundations of the earth and the 
everlasting hills. Admirable Uraniberg ! — ready 



16 THE STARS OF GOD. 

made to hand, vast in size, sumptuous in appoint- 
ments beyond any palace we ever saw, usable by 
everybody without charge and with equal freedom 
(knock at the door of any other first class observa- 
tory for a like privilege and see what you will get,) 
built and kept in repair without a penny of cost to 
any man, carrying us and all our secondary obser- 
vatories with magnificent swiftness and comfort 
on great journeys of discovery and astonishment 
among the constellations — surely this is a wonder- 
ful Observatory, well deserving to be written in 
capitals ! 



II. 

THE MOON. 



THE MOON. 19 

II. 

THE MOON. 

We are outward-bound. And the first star we 
come to is the one to which we should next give 
our attention. 

The old Greek poet iEschylus pictures to us 
Agamemnon, king of men, reclining night after 
night on the roof of the Atridae at Mycenae, and, 
propped on his elbow, watching the round silver 
shield of Dian as it beamed upon him from above. 
Still earlier, Homer gives us this picture of a 
moon-lit scene on the battle fields of Troy, where 
lie with upturned faces the sleeping heroes of 
yesterday and to-morrow: "As when in heaven 
the stars around the glittering moon beam love- 
liest amid the breathless air, and in clear outline 
appear every hill, sharp peak, and woody dell — 
deep upon deep the sky breaks open, and each star 
shines forth, while joys fills the shepherd's heart." 
Let us give a more modern picture. 

It is night. You are abroad among the shadows 
— as perhaps you ought not to be. What are com- 
monly called the stars are shining ; but their light 



20 THE STARS OF GOD. 

is too small to make plain an unfamiliar road. 
Yon stumble, you slip into a slough, you take the 
wrong turn, you run against some person as be- 
nighted as yourself ; in short you wish that you 
had taken a lantern. And, lo, what you wish is 
furnished you — a lantern with the lighting of 
which neither you nor I had anything to do. 

What is that ? In your hesitating and perplexed 
progress your eye happens to rest on the east. A 
narrow streak of nebulous whiteness lies along 
the horizon. It slowly broadens and brightens, 
and soon a silver rim presents itself which, by 
imperceptible degrees expands into a complete 
circle, flushed more or less with gold. Now the 
objects about you begin to show clearly. The 
dim, stumbling, vexatious road stumbles and vexes 
no longer. Every moment improves the situation. 
By the time the moon has mounted above the 
trees your troubles are at an end. Now you can 
walk safely and conveniently all night if you will ; 
for the Heavenly Father has sent his own lantern 
to your rescue. And a brave lantern it is — its soft, 
kindly beams doing hundreds of times as much in 
the way of illumination as all the stars put to- 
gether. You go on your way rejoicing. 

This scene is a sample of what has been all the 
way back to Adam — and longer. The moon is no 



THE MOON. 21 

stranger. Men have walked in the light of it as 
long as they have walked at all. It has shone in 
every sky. Its name appears in every known 
language. It has looked down on every human 
generation and been to it for signs and seasons 
and days and years. Itself substantially un- 
changed, it has seen the rise and fall of empires 
and civilizations and dispensations and geologic 
aeons even. No doubt the moon goes back to the 
world's beginning. And, pray, when was that ? 
Who knows ? A plenty of guesses there are : 
some founded on geological considerations (fogs), 
some on astronomical considerations (another sort 
of fogs), and some on no considerations at all (not 
even fogs) but all the guesses enormously at war 
with one another. I guess that as soon as the 
earth was swinging on its way the moon was 
swinging in its sky — and that was millions of 
years ago. 

What an antique ? Ye who hunt the neighbor- 
hoods through for old furniture, who ransack the 
by-ways of Europe for originals by the old mas- 
ters : ye who spade among the graves of nations 
for relics of primal Greece and Egypt and Assyria 
and count a find rusty with 4000 years as beyond 
all price — what think you of that celestial antiq- 
uity, the old, old moon, that from the beginning or 



22 THE STARS OF GOD. 

ever the earth was has hung its cheery lantern in 
the sky ! There is genuine antiquity for you, 
without the hunting and digging ! And, for aught 
we can see, the relic is as good as new. The moon 
carries no marks of its mighty years. It is not 
faded, worn, tottering, dim-eyed, the worse for 
wear. We see no reason for thinking it does not 
shine as brightly and go on its way as vigorously 
as it ever did : no reason for thinking it cannot go 
on its round of aspects and motions with unflag- 
ging strength, world without end. 

A famous traveler ! Has been journeying time 
out of mind. Not along the lands and seas where 
as yet our travel is compelled to go, but along the 
stretches of the sky where our travel is ambitious 
of going. A fine post for observation has the 
Queen of night had as she has rolled round the 
world on her flashing wheel. All that makes his- 
tory has passed beneath her beaming eye. If she 
could speak how much she would have to tell. 
What additions and subtractions she could make 
to the story of the nations ! How much of what 
is called history would have to blush for itself and 
consent to be called fiction ! 

What is this comely Queen of night, this exalted 
observer, this famous traveller, this mute but 
capable historian, this antique but not antiquated 



THE MOON. 23 

celestial, this delightful painter of field and flood 
and ruins old — of abbeys gray and colosseums 
grand ? It is a star just as the earth is. We some- 
times speak of the moon and stars ; but we mean 
only a distinction as to apparent size. The moon 
appears larger than what are commonly called 
stars, merely because it is nearer to us. If we 
could push it away from us a certain distance it 
would appear to us as a shining point on the sky. 
This moon-star has had the common fate of 
exalted position — unmeasured praise and also un- 
measured abuse. Some have made it out a god- 
dess, and some a devil. Some have worshipped it 
under the name of Diana, goddess of the silver 
bow ; and some under the name of Hecate, queen 
of hell and mother of all evils. The worshipping 
age is past ; but the moon has still its great 
admirers and great abusers. It has more sonnets 
inscribed to it than the sun itself. Also, the worst 
stories are told of it ; for slander loves a shining 
mark and is very apt to hit it. All sorts of evil 
reports have been set on foot against it as being 
unfriendly to plants and animals. The astrologers 
of the Middle Ages and later, would have it that 
moon-beams were poisonous, pest-breeding, es- 
pecially when coming from the neighborhood of 
Saturn. There the moon had an evil eye. There 



24 THE STARS OF GOD. 

it cursed and swore like a pirate. Then let the 
crops look out for droughts and mildews and 
blastings. Then let cattle and men look out 
for debilities, consumptions, convulsions, jaundice, 
lunacy. Wo to him who is born under the " house 
of the moon " ; better not to have been born at 
all ! The bad stories still linger. Dogs are not 
the only things that bark at the moon. Bad to 
sleep in the moonlight, is it ? Hurts certain grains 
and timbers, does it ? That is slander, not to say 
superstition. Do not believe a word of it. Smile 
at it as the Queen herself does. She has a shining 
faculty for standing abuse ; for she shines on good 
humoredly in a Christian way and never answers 
back. She knows she would not harm us on an)- 
account. That consciousness is enough. And 
she goes serenely on her way, flinging down her 
silver on the saucy world as freely as ever. Go 
thou and do likewise, O much abused reader ! 

What men knew about the moon till lately was 
little more than could be learned by the naked eye 
only. Common observation shows a luminous 
disc, about half a degree in diameter, variously 
shaded, apparently moving westward with all the 
other bright objects in the sky and at the same 
time creeping eastward among them so as to 
make a complete circuit in about twenty-seven 



THE MOON. 25 

days ; in the same period waning from a full disc 
to nothing and then waxing back to its old ful- 
ness ; in addition suffering occasional eclipses 
which after eighteen years repeat themselves in 
the same order and at the same intervals as 
before. 

From this small capital put out at usury, we 
have at last come to a large lunar fortune. For 
the observed facts just stated are best accounted 
for by supposing that the moon is a round earth- 
like body, situated between the earth and the sun; 
shining by the reflected light of the sun, and 
revolving about the earth in twenty-seven days. 
This supposition is the simplest possible explana- 
tion of the lunar motions and phases and eclipses ; 
and in our time the simplest explanation of an 
observed fact is the only scientific explanation. 
Accordingly we give a scientific answer to the 
atheist when we tell him that God is the simplest 
explanation of Nature. He ought to be satisfied 
with it. No science has any better. 

But let us go into particulars as to some of the 
chief points of interest in regard to the moon 
which have come to us by the combined aid of 
observation, a just theory, the mighty mathemat- 
ics, and the fact that the moon is the nearest to us 
of all the heavenly bodies. It is to this nearness 



26 THE STARS OF GOD. 

that we owe it that we know far more of the moon 
than we do of any other object in our sky. In a 
city it is by no means certain, or even likely, that 
one knows the most of his nearest neighbor. Per- 
haps that neighbor is the most unknown person in 
the whole great community. But, fortunately, in 
the country it is different. Every man knows 
every other : and he is apt to know best the man 
who lives next to him. The moon lives next to us. 
And the knowledge we have of it is next to that 
we have of the earth itself. 

The shape of the moon is globular. At the full 
it seems like a somewhat clouded silver plate. 
Then it looks as if the plate itself was being eaten 
up, by little and little, by some invisible monster 
whose supply of eatables had been too scanty. 
We seem to see on the ragged edge the marks of 
his teeth. At last all is devoured ; only, however, 
to reappear in a new crescent and slowly wax to 
its former roundness. Notwithstanding this ap- 
parent variety of shapes — crescent, half circle, 
gibbous, full circle — the moon has really but one 
shape, the same the earth has. Only a round body 
could show th.e phases. 

The light of the moon is not its own. If it were 
self-luminous it would, of course, always appear in 
full circle. But it is not seen at all when the sun 



THE MOON. 27 

cannot shine on the face that is turned toward us. 
When the sun is so placed that its beams can 
touch that face it begins to appear as a thin cres- 
cent, and then enlarges as the position of the sun 
becomes more favorable, until at last we have the 
full moon. So the glory of the moon is altogether 
a borrowed one. And it is a great borrower ; for 
it is able to give us from its store a thousand times 
the light we get from all the heavenly bodies put 
together, the sun being excepted — to say nothing 
of what it lavishes on the wastes of space. Hap- 
pily the lender is so rich that he can afford to lend 
largely, to lend without interest, and even to lend 
with the very poorest chance of getting his princi- 
pal back again. 

I have said that the moon is our nearest neigh- 
bor. This was known long before the telescope 
and the modern astronomy, by simply taking the 
angular distance of the sun from a half-moon, 
But we know it by better means now. Among all 
the heavenly bodies none is so much displaced on 
the sky by a given change of place in the observer 
as is the moon. This could not be unless the moon 
were nearer to us than is any other heavenly body. 
When we have found exactly how much this 
displacement amounts to we can tell how far from 
us the moon is. It is about 237000 miles away. 



28 THE STARS OF GOD. 

With this distance we can readily find the lunar 
diameter to be about 2000 miles — a greatness that 
does not astonish us, but doubtless would have 
astonished the ancients ; as many of them at least 
as supposed that the face of the moon was as large 
as the face of a man. 

Xot only is the moon our nearest neighbor 
among the stars, but it is bound to us by still 
closer ties. The mighty bond of the atttaction of 
gravitation is upon both of us. We cannot 
part company if we would. We are held fast 
by a necessity of nature to an eternal partnership. 
The moon must wheel about the earth and go with 
it in its annual voyage about the sun, arid in 
whatever other voyages it has occasion to make. 
Time was when every star was supposed to wheel 
about the earth and to be helplessly yoked to its 
fortunes. But we now know that this is true only 
of the moon. It is our solitary satellite, our one 
domestic of the old life-long pattern ; or rather it 
is Ruth saying to Naomi " The Lord do so to me 
and more also if aught but death part thee and 
me." 

Local neighborhood, especially enforced neigh- 
borhood, sometimes means war. But in the case 
of the earth and moon it means peace, good com- 
panionship, and mutual service. There is not, and 



THE MOON. 29 

never has been, any quarrel between the two stars. 
They move amicably together through all the 
months and years. It is true that the moon dis- 
turbs our motions somewhat, and we disturb its 
motions still more ; but what are called dis- 
turbances are not struggles to get apart but to get 
nearer to each other, or, at least, to prevent a 
wider separation, Their reciprocal action instead 
of being hostile is altogether friendly. They 
make the best of the situation. The moon snows 
us with light, sends- healthful tides through our 
atmosphere and oceans, and though when it 
wrestles with us by the invisible arms of its at- 
traction it makes our gait somewhat unsteady 
and indirect as we go our rounds about the sun, it 
is as a playful child, holding fast by the mother's 
hand and pulling now this way and now that, 
somewhat disturbs her movements, but not so as 
to prevent her going on her way and at last 
reaching her destination. This figure would be 
unfortunate if it should be understood to favor the 
notion of some that the earth is the mother of the 
moon— the source from which it was derived. 

While the moon acts mightily on the earth it 
receives from its larger companion far more than 
it gives. It receives thirteen times as much light 
and more than a hundred times as much attractive 



30 THE STARS OF GOD. 

force. We are by far the stronger partner in the 
partnership and able to carry our points with the 
small stockholder without the least difficulty — just 
as is usual. What tides we must make in the 
atmosphere and oceans of the moon if only she 
has such earthly things! Such things, however, 
our science has not yet been able to discover. But 
how can the " man in the moon" get along without 
air and water ? How do you know that there ai-e 
any men in the moon : or, if there are, that the} 7 " 
are not so made as not to need air and water ? 
Must all intelligent beings be made after one 
pattern ? What is your notion of omnipotence ? 

Perhaps some one has said that every man has a 
side which the public is never permitted to see. 
At least it ought to be said, for it is true and 
important. But whether true and important in 
the case of men or not, it certainly is in the case of 
the moon. Only one side of the moon is ever 
shown to us. In going about the earth our satel- 
lite carefully keeps the same face turned toward 
us as does the courtier toward the queen on leav- 
ing the presence. This is done by turning round 
once on its axis during one revolution about us. 
Instead of making one rotation in twenty-four 
hours, as the earth does, it proceeds far more 



THE MOON. 31 

liesurely and takes twenty-seven days for the 
work. 

In going about the earth the moon sometimes 
passes through the earth's shadow, and so is 
eclipsed. When it comes between us and the sun 
the latter is eclipsed. These solar and lunar 
eclipses used to alarm people at large terribly ; 
for they were thought to mean divine displeasure 
and to forebode all sorts of public calamities. 
Armies and nations grew pale ; and even now a 
large part of mankind are ill at ease when the sun 
or moon seems being eaten up b}^ an invisible 
monster. But they need not be frightened. The 
only eclipse the public has to fear just now is an 
eclipse of faith. And they have great occasion to 
fear that. Indeed, I know of nothing they have 
so great occasion to fear. Unbelief is a tragedy, a 
portent, a pit from the bottom of which no star 
can be seen. Into that pit many are just now 
falling. They are lunatics — but have not been 
made such by the moon. 

To the naked eye the moon has a diversified 
face — some parts appearing brighter than others. 
With a very low telescopic power we see large 
shaded patches such as appear on maps of the 
earth to represent the savage and semi-civilized 
countries. These smooth, dusky patches were at 



32 THE STARS OF GOD. 

first supposed to be seas, and received names 
accordingly — as Mare Frigoris, Mare Imbrium, 
Mare Serenitatis ; which mean the Sea of Cold, 
the vSea of Showers, the Sea of Serenity. Then 
why not say so, in plain English ? Did you 
ever hear of a little thing called jealousy ? Well, 
you are to understand that English astronomers 
did not want to see French or German names 
fastened on the moon ; and French and German 
astronomers did not want English names there ; 
and so all parties compromised on the Latin 
which were popular with the learned of all coun- 
tries. These names are still retained though no 
astronomer now supposes that they stand for 
water, but for comparatively smooth plains. 

Still higher telescopic powers bring out other 
features. Now our neighbor somehow seems to 
have managed to fall among thieves in its travels. 
It looks deplorably in need of some good Samari- 
tan to come along and bind up its wounds ; for, 
wounded and battered and scarred, as if by the 
fist of some triumphant bruiser whose mercy is of 
the smallest and fist of the largest, is the face that 
to the naked eye seems so brightly cheerful. 

A further increase of power turns the scars 
into ring-shaped figures all over the surface ; and 
under the best telescopes the rings swell out into 



THE MOON. zi 

huge craters sometimes greatly below the general 
surface and sometimes greatly above ; sometimes 
with cones of considerable elevation within, such 
as we find in earthly volcanoes, and often with 
streaks radiating from them in every direction. 
Plainly the moon has been tremendously volcanic 
— far beyond anything in the earth's experience. 
Such upheavals, such mighty moonquakes, such 
belching out of molten rock from the furnaces 
within through rifted mountain sides, such ear- 
splitting explosions and vociferations into shud- 
dering space (supposing air) ! Be thankful that 
you were not there to see and hear and suffer. 

Many of these crater-mountains are far larger 
in proportion to 'the moon than are our largest 
mountains in proportion to the earth. The chief 
of them have been named after certain dead 
celebrities — as Plato and Copernicus and Kepler 
and Tycho. I say dead celebrities. Not one of 
them could have gotten such honor while living. 
But just as soon as he was dead jealousy of him 
began to die ; and, by the time he had been dead a 
hundred years, men were quite ready to give him 
a place in the lunar Westminster Abbey. 

Few mountain ranges are found in the moon. 
The principal ones are named from earthly ranges 
— as the Apennines, the Alps, the Caucasus. The 
3 



34 THE STARS OF GOD. 

Apennines begin small, rise gradually for 450 
miles and then end abruptly in an almost vertical 
descent of four miles amid a scene of stormy 
grandeur and wreck without a peer. 

Our present instruments bring us within fifty 
miles of the moon. With the help of photography 
wonderful maps of the surface have been made 
that give a better general view of it than we have 
of the earth. And one far more awe-inspiring. 
Nowhere else can we get such an idea of what the 
wreck of Nature and the crush of worlds would 
be. A mountainous region of the wildest and 
most savage discription in comparison with which 
our Switzerlands and Rockies are tame. Enormous 
chasms and cavities, great mountains overthrown 
in every direction, mammoth extinct volcanoes, 
thirty-nine summits higher than Mt. Blanc — to 
make railroads in such a land would cost more 
than §20,000 a mile. What an experience in shak- 
ing and quaking the moon must have had some 
day ! It is a world turned upside down. It is 
a carnival of physical disaster. It is petrified 
wrath. It is as if all the tossings and wrestlings 
and outbursts of a cosmic Bedlam had been caught 
at the wildest and stiffened into stone. 

This is what Luna seems. But a dreadful 
seeming does not always cover a dreadful fact. Is 



THE MOON. 35 

it not possible that the extremely rough and 
shattered state of the moon may help its purpose 
as a reflector of sunlight to the earth ? Is it really 
the uninhabited desert it has_been thought to be — 
a sort of stellar purgatory — or do lovely vales of 
Cashmere hide among the lunar Himalayas and 
furnish delightful homes to beings who, though 
constituted differently from ourselves in some 
respects, are yet like us in their power to know 
and worship the Almighty Builder of worlds ? 



III. 

THE SUN 



THE SUN. 39 

III. 

THE SUN. 

The sun also is a star — for the same reasons 
that the earth and moon are stars, and for other 
reasons besides. It, too, if removed to a certain 
distance from us would appear as a bright point on 
the sky. 

From the beginning the sun has bees the most 
conspicuous natural object within the range of 
human vision. Neither on the earth nor in the 
sky has ever been seen anything so dazzlingly 
bright, so terribly glorious. Who dares to look on 
it with unshielded eyes ? It has a name in every 
language. Every child lisps it among his first 
efforts at articulate speech. It enters into all 
historic records and is the fundamental condition 
on which all human affairs proceed. Daily famil- 
iarity with it deadens the impression it naturally 
makes ; but could some adult man see it for the 
first time in its unclouded mid-day brilliancy, 
or pavilioned amid its sunset glories, he would 
think no other visible object worthy of note in 
comparison — could perhaps be easily persuaded by 



40 THE STARS OF GOD. 

Satan to think it Deity Himself and fall down 
before it in worship, as thousands have done. 
Alas ! 

If the moon is queen of the night, certainly the 
sun is king of the day. No other king ever blazed 
away so gloriously in barbaric pearl and gold. 
Brighter than anything else known to us ; several 
times brighter than lightning itself ; brighter than 
all other celestial objects if packed together — it is 
a fitting symbol of the final glory of the redeemed, 
of the present glory of the holy angels, and even 
of the eternal glory of the Lord. So think the 
Holy Scriptures. And they know. 

This most imposing monarch outshines as much 
in usefulness as in glory. Were it not for the sun 
we should not have the currents that now do so 
much to keep our air and waters in a healthy 
state. Were it not for the sun all the beautiful 
colors that are seen in Nature would be wanting ; 
for it paints the blueness of the sky, the greenness 
of the fields, the endless hues of flowers and birds 
and leaves and gems, and even the mingled lily 
and rose on the cheek of beauty. Were it not for 
it the earth might become a knight errant, and go 
off romancing into the depths of space, colliding 
with and dashing in pieces other worlds and itself 
also. Were it to withdraw its beams the pall 



THE SUN. 41 

of perpetual night would settle on the whole 
world ; years and seasons and days would cease 
their grateful round ; the earth would shiver as it 
darkened, would stiffen as it shivered, would be- 
come frozen stone to its very core, and not all the 
forests that clothe its surface nor coals and oil 
that hide within could keep it from becoming 
a dead world. We ourselves would disappear 
if the sun should disappear. I say disappear — 
nothing more. 

These are facts. But they have been expanded 
into fictions by some who have spoken and written 
in the name of science. We are told that not only 
is the substance of the earth derived from the 
sun, but that all terrestrial life is generated by it, 
and even that all our intellectual and moral 
powers and activities, all our philosophy and 
poetry and statesmanship and science and even 
religion itself, are contained potentially in its 
beams. 

To put it mildly, this is pernicious nonsense. 
Life and mind are not the product of solar forces. 
The sun is not a creator. It is merely the condition 
of our activity and life in this world. It is that 
without which beings constituted as we are could 
not long continue to work, or even to exist as liv- 
ing bodily structures. That is all. And that is a 



42 THE STARS OF GOD. 

very different thing from saying that "the sun 
is the ultimate source of all vegetable and animal 
life and even of the phenomena of mind." This 
latter means materialism, and materialism in the 
end means atheism. 

This very useful, but by no means divine, lumi- 
nary has from remote times been supposed to be 
far more remote from us than is the moon. An 
ancient astronomer inferred this from the position 
of the two bodies in respect to each other at the 
time of the half moon. But the actual distance of 
the sun from us is found by means of what is 
called its parallax. How much is it apparently 
displaced on the sky by a given change in the 
place of an observer ? The answer to this question 
amazes us by giving a distance of about 93 mil- 
lions of miles — a distance so immense that sensa- 
tion itself could not travel so far during three 
human generations, and yet not so great but that 
the sun is able to shoot its luminous arrows across 
it in eight minutes. With this distance a body 
appearing as large as the moon must be 800,000 
miles in diameter. See one of the many illustra- 
tions furnished by astronomy that first impressions 
are often false impressions ! Things often are not 
what they seem. It is always safe to look at an 
object twice before making up your mind about it. 



THE SUN. 43 

Eight hundred thousand miles in diameter! 
This means a globe that could hold more than a 
million earths. But this tells us nothing about the 
relative quantities of matter in the two bodies. 
How do we know but that the sun is as dense 
as platinum ? How do we know but that it is as 
tenuous as hydrogen and so has very little matter 
in its huge bulk ? We know by comparing the at- 
tracting forces of the sun and earth on the same 
object at the same distance. We find that the sun 
pulls 350,000 times stronger on the moon than the 
earth would if equally remote. That settles the 
matter ; for attraction is directly as the quantity 
of matter. Though the amount of matter in the 
sun is so enormous, the average density is only 
one quarter that of the earth, and yet is consider- 
ably greater than that of water. How such a 
density as this can be maintained in the presence 
of such ferocious and incalculable heat as belongs 
to the sun is one of the solar mysteries — and 
likely to remain so. 

The sun holds several such mysteries in its 
capacious and fervid bosom. Really, the brightest 
object in the heavens is one of the obscurest. The 
veil before it is very thick although of fire. It 
illuminates other things without itself, but noth- 
ing within itself. Its floods of beams throw 



44 THE STARS OF GOD. 

no light whatever on many of the questions it 
suggests. "What we find about them is a dense 
fog of mutually contradictory speculations which, 
however, sometimes venture to call themselves 
established science. This is not to be wondered 
at : for the sun is the shadow of God. He is a 
vast illuminator : our best knowledge comes from 
Him ; and yet He remains largely unsearchable 
and his ways past finding out. 

Let us turn a properly shaded telescope on our 
luminary. We find that it always keeps the same 
circular bright disc, whatever its situation in 
respect to us and so must be a self-luminous globe. 
We also notice that the face is not of uniform 
brightness but has parts relatively very dark. 
These dark spots are seen creeping at a certain 
uniform rate across the face in parallel lines ; 
which shows that the sun turns round on one of 
its own diameters once in twenty-seven days. 
But this earthlike rotation brings to the sun no 
grateful vicissitude of day and night. Eternal day 
reigns yonder — and such a day ! Eternal summer 
burns on from age to age, without cessation or 
cloud. And such a summer ! This would not 
recommend it as a home for such beings as our- 
selves. 



THE SUN. 45 

As we continue our watch of the disc an eclipse 
comes on. The moon creeps in between us and 
the sun, and at last hides the entire face. Then 
we see all about the moon's edge a glorious, 
radiated halo of silver whiteness. This is called 
' the corona and shows that we commonly see only a 
part of the sun ; that like the earth, it has an 
atmosphere, though of different materials from 
ours. At the base of the corona and resting 
on the body of the sun there is seen a zone of 
scarlet color in a state of vast agitation and some- 
times tossing itself in jets 300,000 miles high. 
This zone goes by the name of chromosphere, and is 
thought to consist of clouds of metallic vapor 
more dense than other parts of the solar atmos- 
phere. This whole atmosphere is supposed to ex- 
tend at least half a million of miles beyond the 
body of the sun as it appears to the eye; and there 
are not wanting those who stretch the supposition 
(and suppositions are easily stretched) so far as to 
say that this atmosphere once extended more than 
three thousand millions of miles away, and that 
out of its substance by the mere operation of 
natural forces and laws the earth and some hun- 
dreds of other worlds were formed. This suppo- 
sition has naturally had great favor with atheists 
as making a God unnecessary to account for 



46 THE STARS OF GOD. 

Nature and therefore tmphilosophical and unscien- 
tific. But there are against it grave astronomical 
objections, as well as theological, which increase 
as our knowledge of the heavens increases. 

All astronomers agree that the sun is a world 
on fire after a most tremendous fashion. They 
differ as to many things ; and many a lance has 
been broken to shivers over the spots, the faculse, 
the solidity, and the original extent of the sun. 
But that it is the greatest bonfire the world ever 
saw is universally conceded — provided that noth- 
ing festive is understood by the word bonfire. None 
of us would feel like making merry in the imme- 
diate neighborhood of such a mighty conflagration. 
Awe and terror rather than hilarity would possess 
us. Ah, such oceans and tempests and gehennas 
of devouring heat ! This might reasonably be 
inferred from the enormous amount of light and 
heat that we, at so vast a distance from the sun, 
receive from it. How it blazes and burns on our 
tropics and equators ? As the intensity of light 
and heat varies inversely as the square of the dis- 
tance from the radiant body, at the solar surface 
it must be great beyond all our power to measure 
or even conceive. A thermometer that could 
measure that heat would need to be about as long 
as the sun is remote. Never was such a furnace ! 



THE SUN. 47 

The sun is in a state of sublime and terrible 
conflagration in comparison with which the fires 
that devour our prairies and cities, and leap and 
roar like triumphing fiends from destruction to 
destruction are of no account. 

As we look at the sun through our shaded 
telescopes we note many signs of vast commotion. 
Now and then a spot breaks up with the sudden- 
ness of the most sudden thunder clap. Under our 
eyes the fiery ocean moils and boils and flings 
itself aloft in surf and breakers and enormous 
geysers that seem in an agony to get as far as 
possible into the cooling void. We notice currents 
that sweep along at the rate of three hundred 
miles a second — more than ten thousand times the 
rate of the swiftest earthly winds that so carry 
everything before them. Never was earthly ocean 
so lashed into fury by Euroclydons as is that 
great flaming ocean that we call the sun. And 
the consequence must be noises almost as terrible 
as the light and heat. To us, at our distance, the 
sun is as silent as the grave ; the nonconducting 
emptiness between walls out completely the un- 
speakable uproar. But at the solar surface that 
uproar must be enough to kill the living (such 
living as ours) if not to waken the dead. Such a 
frenzied maelstrom of thunders and thunderous 



4 8 THE STARS OF GOD. 

groans and shrieks and frightful detonations ! — 
not all the artillery of the nations and of the 
clouds shouting together could make such a prodi- 
gious and affrighting outburst of sound. To the 
ear, as well as to the eye, the sun would be a 
Pandemonium. 

Calling to the aid of the telescope the doctrine 
of gravitation and the higher mathematics we find 
that the sun is even a more restless body than we 
have just described. Not only do its fiery oceans 
and atmospheres toss about after the most frantic 
fashion, as "if tormented in the intolerable fires ; 
not only does it rotate so as to wheel its surface 
about at the rate of more than 100,000 miles a day, 
but we know that it must have very many trans- 
latory motions in space. Some of these motions 
are only apparent — as its daily motion about the 
earth and its annual motion among the stars east- 
ward, but it has also many real motions which are 
carrying it incessantly into new regions never 
before visited and never to be visited again. The 
law of gravity requires that in the case of only 
two bodies making a stable system both should re- 
volve about their common centre of gravity. This 
centre, in the case of the earth and sun lies far 
within the surface of the latter, so that the sun- 
centre has only a very small orbit compared with 



TAE SUN. 49 

that of the earth — relatively so small that for 
most purposes it may be considered no orbit at all. 
Still it must sometimes be taken into account ; 
with many corrections on account of other simul- 
taneous motions For the solar motion is not 
exactly about the common centre of gravity just 
spoken of, but about that of three bodies, viz., the 
sun and earth and moon — not even exactly about 
this, but about that of the whole solar system; not 
even exactly about this but about the common 
gravity- centre of all the heavenly bodies, both 
those we see and those we do not see. In fine, the 
sun is moving on an orbit that is the resultant of 
innumerable attractions and must therefore be 
sweeping grandly about a centre inconceivably re- 
mote. Instead of being fixed, the sun is one of the 
mightest and most audacious of travellers and 
explorers, wheeling through the unknown with as 
much assurance as if following some celestial 
tramway. Such tramway, however, would get out 
of repair, but the law of gravity never. This law 
is the right hand with which God drives the 
chariot of the sun. It supplies at each moment 
sure guidance to its rushing and fire-breathing 
coursers. So they go safely on their way through 
the glooms ; never stopping, never hesitating, 



50 THE STARS OF GOD. 

never colliding, never swerving one jot from the 
will of Him who holds the reins. 

What sort of matter is that seething in yon 
great crucible ? The spectroscope tells us that 
the sun contains several elements that are found 
in the earth (as iron, zinc, copper, etc) ; but inas- 
much as out of thousands of lines in the solar 
spectrum only about nine hundred have been 
referred to known terrestrial substances it looks 
as though the sun is largely composed of sub- 
stances not belonging to the earth and so could 
not be the source from which the sun is derived. 
The element of oxygen) if it exists at all in the sun, 
is there in inappreciable amount while it makes 
not far from one half of the substance of our 
globe. If our globe had been detached from the 
sun whose elements are violently seething to- 
gether in a tremendous stirabout of vapors and 
gases it would, apparently, have consisted of the 
same elements in something like the same pro- 
portion. 

For aught we know there has been no diminu- 
ation in the intensity of the fires of the sun within 
human history or any other history. A failing has 
"been suspected, indeed has been asserted ; and 
some even have gone so far as to say how long it 
will be before the sun becomes a frozen world. 



THE SUN. 51 

But this is all speculation, without any foundation 
in experience and observation. Some countries 
have grown colder, but others have grown 
warmer ; and there is no evidence that the earth 
is now getting from the sun one particle less heat 
than it received at the remotest geological epoch. 
What feeds these unfailing fires which blaze away 
into space with such enormous prodigality ? It 
seems as if there must be supply as well as ex- 
penditure. All outgoes and no incomes mean 
poverty, sooner or later. Some have thought that 
the heat of the sun is kept up by the constant in- 
rush upon it of meteors. Others think this source 
of supply quite inadequate, and claim that the sun 
must be gradually cooling, though as yet imper- 
ceptibly, and that the time creeps on when the earth 
will cease to be habitable on account of the cold and 
the darkness. They will have it that the world 
will die by freezing instead of burning. Instead 
of the 'melting of the elements with fervent heat 
and the burning up of the earth and the works that 
are therein,' they maintain that just the opposite 
event will occur. We had better take the Biblical 
view — which is also the more scientific, no doubt; 
though some tell us that the Bible-science cannot 
be depended on. They cannot be depended on. 



IV. 
THE SOLAR FAMILY-I 



RESEMBLANCES. 

DIFFERENCES. 

ANTIQUITY. 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 55 

IV. 

THE SOLAR FAMILY-I. 

RESEMBLANCES DIFFERENCES ANTIQUITY. 

"When what are commonly called stars are close- 
ly watched, certain differences appear among them. 
The greater part seem to the naked eye to have 
no motion whatever among themselves — only the 
regular motion from east to west that is common 
to all stars. But others are seen to move about 
among the rest ; some of them as if they had lost 
their way through the trackless spaces and were 
engaged in seeking it after a very irresolute and 
zigzag fashion, and of course never finding it. 

The chief of these wanderers [planets the Greeks 
called them) bear the most honorable names that 
the ancients could possibly give ; for they are the 
names of their highest divinities — Mercury, Venus, 
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. Besides 
these magnates, there are already known to us 
about four hundred smaller nomads called asteroids; 
also a very large number of cloud-like, spectral 
bodies which, under the names of comets and 



56 THE STARS OF GOD. 

meteors make swifter motions along the sky than 
any other heavenly bodies. All these bodies, and 
probably some others not discovered, are sharply 
distinguished from other stars by the large ap- 
parent changes in place that the}' undergo in a 
short time. 

Now this could not be unless all these vagrants 
were nearer to us and to one another than to 
the other stars. They must be our nearest neigh- 
bors. They, with the earth, must make a group 
of celestial islets in the great ocean of space — a 
group separated by vast wastes from other stars. 
And the sun itself must belong to this group or 
family ; for we have seen that it, too, changes its 
apparent place among the stars enormously. 

I have called this group a family. And it 
deserves the name. Its members are as near to 
one another on the scale of the heavens as* the 
people living in the same house are to one another 
on the scale of the earth. The distances between 
themselves are as nothing compared with those 
separating them from the fixed stars. Also, they 
have a common head, strongly resemble one an- 
other in important respects, and are bound to- 
gether by stronger bonds than those connecting 
them with other stars. In fact they are so bound 
together that a mishap to one of them would 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 57 

bring all to grief. Blot out one of them and the 
whole group would stagger like a drunken man, or 
like the ox on whose forehead has fallen the fatal 
blow. This, however, is true of the planets only. 

I have called the companions of the sun the 
solar family. This I do because the sun is the 
largest, most conspicuous, and most controlling 
member of the group — in loco parentis. So we 
name the family after him. If any choose to call 
him king instead of father, and to call the planets 
subjects instead of children, we do not object. He 
does govern right royally, no doubt ; but so do 
some heads of families who are only foster fathers 
or even elder brothers. So we may regard him as 
the father of the family though it was not evolved 
from him. No doubt the sun is the head of the 
planetary household and deserves to have it named 
from himself. 

So let me introduce to you the solar family — 
planets, asteroids, comets ; but, first of all, the 
planets Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, 
Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. I name them in the 
order of their distances from the sun. 

A question ? Shall I now take up these wander- 
ing stars in their order, and give the most notable 
facts in regard to each — speaking successively of 
such matters as the great heat and rattling pace 



58 THE STARS OF GOD. 

of Mercury, the "sweetness and light" of Venus as 
the morning and evening star, red Mars with 
manifest continents and seas and snowy poles and 
baby moons, belted Jupiter with disturbed face 
and huge waist and five well grown sons going 
and coming and teaching us how to measure the 
velocity of light, curiously be-ringed Saturn with 
his family octave, Uranus with his body-guard of 
children four, Neptune wheeling with three moons 
through the Siberian frontiers of the system ? 
Shall I proceed in this ancient and well beaten 
track — and take the consequences ? 

I think not. The consequences would be too 
formidable — that is too dull for both myself and 
my reader. Besides, time and space are precious. 
We have to proceed currente et ardente calamo, if we 
proceed at all. So we will try another plan — one 
that perhaps will not bristle so much with those 
long astronomical numerals, measurements, and 
statistics that repel so many, are so unmeaning to 
most, and are steeped in sunsets or sunrises to 
nobody. 

Almost every family has some features that are 
common to all its members. We call them family 
traits. It is sometimes hard to tell what it is that 
makes the family likeness which yet we easily 
recognize. Is it the size of the eye, or the color of 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 59 

the hair, or the height of the forehead, or the 
width of the mouth, or is it a peculiar expression 
made up of all these ? We may not be able to 
say ; we may only know that there is something- 
running through all the family membership that 
makes it possible for us to exclaim, off hand, when 
we see a member, There goes a Bourbon .' 

But in the case of the solar family we find no 
difficulty whatever in particularizing the family 
traits. They are easily seen and stated — especially 
in the case of the planets. Thus, all the^planets 
are worlds in size ; all are globular in form ; all 
rotate on steadfast axes ; all revolve about the sun 
in elliptical orbits : all revolve in the same direc- 
tion and in nearly the same plane ; all are gov- 
erned in their movements by the same laws and 
can have their places in the sky at any given 
moment accurately predicted ; all are non- 
luminous and shine by the reflected light of the 
sun. I may as well add, what few scientists will 
dispute, that all the planets either have been, or 
are. or will be inhabited by rational and respon- 
sible beings. 

But in every family, however many the respects 
in which the members resemble one another, there 
are other respects in which each is unlike all the 
rest. Once in a great while twins can be found so 



6o THE STARS OF GOD. 

nearly alike that a " comedy of errors" naturally 
results. But such cases are extremely rare. Com- 
monly Antilophus of Ephesus and Antilophus of 
Syracuse are easily distinguishable from each 
other. A mere glance is enough to show that it is 
A that we see and not some other letter of the 
alphabet. Very seldom indeed have we colorable 
pretext for asking, " Is it you or your brother ?" 
If there is any planet that might be a twin brother 
of the earth it is Mars ; if there is any planet that 
might be a twin sister of the earth it is Venus ; 
but no observer, looking at these worlds from the 
highways of space, would be in any danger of mis- 
taking one of them for either of the others. Much 
less would there be danger of confounding either 
of these with the other planets — so great are the 
differences between them. 

Variety in unity — such is the astronomical law. 
Differences cropping out of uniformities and 
agreements show themselves liberally among the 
members of the solar family. They differ in size ; 
which ranges from a diameter of about 3000 miles 
in the case of Mercury to one of 85,000 in the case 
of Jupiter. They differ in distance from the sun ; 
which ranges from about 35 millions of miles in 
the case of Mercury to nearly 3000 millions of 
miles in the case of Xeptune. They differ in time 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 61 

of revolution about the sun ; which ranges from 
about three months in the case of Mercury to 165 
years in the case of Neptune. They differ in 
density ; which ranges from that of lead in the 
case of Mercury to that of cork in the case of 
Saturn. They differ in the number and size of 
their moons — a number that ranges from zero (so 
far as we yet know) in the case of Mercury and 
Venus to eight in the case of Saturn ; and a size 
that ranges from tiny globes of from five to fifty 
miles in diameter in the case of Mars to globes 
almost as large as Mars himself in the case of 
Jupiter and Saturn. 

In consequence of the difference in distance 
from the sun, the planets differ exceedingly in the 
amount of light and heat they receive. This 
amount ranges from about ten times what the 
earth receives in the case of Mercury to about a 
three-hundredth part of what the earth receives in 
the case of Neptune. Think of a planet ten times 
hotter than our hottest summers! Think of a 
planet three hundred times colder than our coldest 
winters ! This thought has caused some to ques- 
tion whether it is possible that there are inhabi- 
tants in at least the extremes of our system. But 
why should it be a question ? "We ought only to 
say that living beings at these extremes must 



62 THE STARS OF GOD. 

either be differently constituted from ourselves, or 
they must have sources of light and heat indepen- 
dent of the sun — neither of which things is incred- 
ible or even unlikely. The earth has in itself no 
small stores of heat and light ; Neptune ma)' 
contain far more and Mercury far less. Besides, 
how unlikely it is that an almighty Creator should 
make all living rational beings of one pattern ! 
Vigorous and sportive life abounds in Arctic colds 
and equinoctial heats in which you and I would 
speedily perish. 

Sometimes a large family has a member greatly 
different from all the rest. He is so different as 
to excite wonder. He has a certain vein of family 
likeness ; but then on the whole what heights and 
depths of unlikeness in features, in figure, in dis- 
position, in taste, in moral and mental endowments 
of many sorts ! Perhaps he is admirable Crich- 
ton ; perhaps almost a Caliban. In either case he 
is an astonishment, considering his surroundings. 
How could such parents have such a child ! How 
could such a child have such brothers and sisters ! 
He is like a bowlder around which geologists 
gather and say // does not belong here. 

Two members of the solar family differ from 
the rest after this huge fashion. These are the 
sun and Saturn. The sun is a glowing furnace, a 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 6 



glorious bonfire ; the only one in the system. 
Saturn is a world surrounded by a curious assem- 
blage of rings ; the only such world we know in 
our system, or in any other. A strange object, said 
the first telescope. The latest telescope says the 
same. Saturn is still a first-class mystery. He 
looks like a foreigner, a lusus naturce. He is the 
show member of the family -to astronomical begin- 
ners. He has drawn more fire from telescopes, 
from speculations, and from popular lectures than 
has any other member, excepting the sun himself. 
And truly that series of concentric rings, hanging 
in everlasting equilibrium, rotating about the 
planet, spanning its evening vault with their 
broad, lustrous baldrics* behind which come and 
go eight moons in all stages of phase from crescent 
to full, must make the night of Saturn one that 
cannot be matched for varied and glorious splen- 
dor on any other planet. The Greeks called him 
Chronos and thought him a monster. Let us call 
and think him a Te Deum of the heavens, an 
oratorio of the night, one of the many wonderful 
creations of Him who knows how to diversify 
worlds as well as the forms of organic life. 

Some families pride themselves on their antiq- 
uity. They have been conspicuous and influential 
for generations, perhaps for centuries. Perhaps 



64 THE STARS OF GOD. 

they came over in the Mayflower ; perhaps they 
came over with William the Conqueror ; perhaps 
they are Howards or Hohenzollerns or Romanoffs, 
almost claim never to have been otherwise. What 
a long and shining chain of descent it is that we 
follow back till the golden links dim and disap- 
pear in prehistoric darkness ; and how the link of 
to-day congratulates itself that so many goodly 
predecessors bind it to the remote past ! But, 
looking upward, we see in the solar family an 
antiquity that defies competition. There may be 
older things in the heavens (indeed, on reflection 
I know that there are), but not on the earth. Who 
knows when that celestial family began ? Its 
leading members have had names time out of 
mind. No doubt the many members of the family 
discovered within the last century have been in 
their places as long as any. Though we cannot 
tell exactly how long a time that involves, we 
know that some greatly antedate the human 
family itself ; for we have learned that the earth 
and sun were in existence an indefinite stretch of 
ages before man appeared. Some geologists have 
tried, in a rude way, to compute this stretch from 
the strata of the earth ; some astronomers have 
tried, in a ruder way, to find out how long it would 
take to ripen, in a way of natural law, an immense 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 65 

cloud of gases and vapors into a system of solid 
worlds. All give us very formidable figures. 
Hundreds of millions of years slip easily from 
tongue and pen. But oh, the mighty disagree- 
ment between the computers ! Of course these 
men are guessers. What they know, and all that 
they know, is that the solar family was in existence 
ages and ages before the human generations be- 
gan to march from that first pair to the 1400 mil- 
lions now spread over the earth. This we do 
know. And the antiquaries who go into raptures 
over a piece of old furniture, or over a broken tool 
dug from the dust heaps of the first Troy, or over 
the torso of a winged lion unearthed from Birs 
Nimroud, and who say as they touch it with 
reverent finger, How very old this is, and what an ex- 
perience it has had I may find something still more 
worthy of their antiquarian enthusiasm by gazing 
aloft at that old, old solar family which God made 
"in the beginning." 

This ancient family above us which has never 
run out, which has never been broken up by 
attacks from without nor by dissensions within, 
differs greatly in one respect from old human 
families. Its antiquity is that of the individuals 
composing it. Human families may have lasted 
long, but the individuals at any time composing 



66 THE STARS OF GOD. 

them have lasted but a short time. " One genera- 
tion goeth and another generation cometh." It is 
only the succession that endures. But in the solar 
family it is the individual that goes on and on so 
wonderfully. The same wandering stars that first 
attracted human notice are wandering above us 
still. The same flaming eyes that look down 
nightly on us looked down on the " garden east- 
ward in Eden " and on the long succession of 
brute animals and plants that preceded it. 

Celestial Antiquities, we salute you, and through 
you most reverently that Ancient of Days from 
whom you came, on whose errands you go, and of 
whom 3^ou are the faint shadows ! 



V. 
THE SOLAR FAMILY -II 



FUTURE. 

HARMONY. 

HISTORY. 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 69 

V. 

THE SOLAR FAMILY -II. 

FUTURE HARMONY HISTORY. 

The solar family has had a long past. I will not 
side with one guesser and say that the long past is 
ten millions of years, nor with another guesser 
and say that it is 200 millions of years. But this I 
can say — the past is long, very long. 

But what about the future of the solar family ? 
Is that also long, very long ? 

Past longevity does not necessarily argue long- 
evity to come. It may even argue death at the 
door. So astronomers have not failed to ask 
anxiously about the future of our celestial house- 
hold. Are there any signs of decay about it ? Is 
there anything answering to gray hairs and 
wrinkles and bent forms and tottering steps ? 

Nothing of the sort has yet been noticed. For 
aught we can see the eye of lovely Venus is not 
getting dim, nor is the natural force of swift 
Mercury abating. There is no evidence from 
records that any of their companions have ever 



yo THE STARS OF GOD. 

shone more brilliantly, or gone on their way more 
vigorously than they are doing now. So far as 
observation and history go theirs is a case of 
immortal youth. 

Not only do astronomers generally admit this, 
but they think that they have found by close study 
of the constitution of the family that it contains in 
itself no seeds of decay. It was framed for per- 
petuity. Nothing in its structure hinders it from 
going on forever. La Place has the chief honor in 
proving by his magnificent mathematics the in- 
trinsic stability of the System of the World. Will 
the system, then, always remain as it is at present? 
We cannot say that. Is there an ether diffused 
through the planetary spaces the natural effect of 
which, however attenuated, must be to retard the 
motion of the planets and at last to bring them all 
together in frightful concussion and ruin ? Has 
that Almighty Will that first organized the solar 
system, and that still besets it behind and before 
and lays his hand upon it — has this Almighty 
Governor no plan for setting the system aside, 
sooner or later ? 

God has a plan for burning up the earth, even to 
the point of complete dissolution ; but that this 
earthly dissolution will extend to other worlds we 
do not know. " The heavens shall pass away with 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 71 

a great noise and the elements shall melt with 
fervent heat and the earth and the works that are 
therein shall be burned up." This shows what is 
sure to happen, some day, to our world and its 
atmospheric envelope. But the same divine power 
that miraculously turns even the rocks into flam- 
ing gases can, if it chooses, fend off that flame 
from our companion worlds. Besides, conflagra- 
tion and dissolution are not extinction ; and dur- 
ing the whole fiery process by which the earth 
will be rejuvenated into the new heavens and new 
earth in which shall dwell righteousness, from first 
to last the earth may have been holding its place 
and going its rounds without at all endangering 
the other members of the family. The household 
is still entire though one member is sick and under 
thorough treatment. At last recovery will be 
complete. When this will be we do not know ; we 
only know that it will be in connection with the 
final judgment. Whether that will be to-morrow, 
or some 365,000 years hence, let him who knows 
tell. 

This vast longevity in the past, and possibly in 
the future, is the more remarkable on account 
of the exceeding restlessness of all the members 
of the solar family. In this respect it is very un- 
like most long-lived families. These have rested 



72 THE STARS OF GOD. 

every night. They have rested one day in seven. 
Also, they have thrown in a holiday, every now 
and then, for good measure. So they have been 
well preserved. But nervous, restless, flighty 
people ; people always in motion and hurry, are 
apt to wear out soon. They are always on the 
way to exhaustion and break-down. 

" A rolling stone gathers no moss." If this is so, 
those rolling stones that make up the solar family 
will never be well-to-do. They are always on the 
go. They are never still — no, not for a single 
minute. They are rolling on their axes, they are 
rolling about one another, they are rolling about 
the sun, and as they roll they are ever courteously 
making bows more or less profound to one another 
and to all the shining stars. And this is not all : 
for, as we have seen, the sun himself cannot be 
quiet one single moment. It is safe to say that, 
long as he has been in existence, he never could 
have been found twice in the same place. The 
place where he is to-day is not the place where he 
was yesterday, nor is it the place where it will be 
to-morrow. A long good-bye to all three places : 
he will never see either of them again, never. The 
fact is he has no fixed home. If "three removes 
are as bad as a fire " then he is badly off indeed ; 
for never did so incorrigible a nomad roam Scy- 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 73 

thian steppes or Arabian deserts. He is running a 
lightning express day and night, absolutely with- 
out stops, carrying with him the whole solar family 
on a sublime curve whose centre is itself constant- 
ly moving. Is it not a little strange that such a 
perpetual motion of a family that never takes a 
vacation, or a Sabbath, or even a night's rest, has 
lasted so long without sign of wear or tear ? 

" Not so very strange," the fathers said. " Con- 
sider what a roomy house this solar family lives in 
— a house so large that each member has plenty of 
elbow room, can air his peculiarities freely, need 
not interfere with the business or the whims of 
any other. Even enemies could manage to live 
together in a house 6000 millions of miles in 
diameter." And they went on to tell of a vast 
crystal dome to which all the fixed stars are 
fastened, far outside of all the planets and com- 
pletely roofing them in. Under this glorious 
spangled roof dwell all the solar family from age 
to age. In so spacious house the inmates could 
move about after a very free and independent 
fashion without much risk of damaging collisions 
or even unpleasant friction. If anybody had 
questioned the reality of this crystal palace a few 
centuries ago he would have been unanimously 
cast out of the synagogue of science. But now 



74 THE STARS OF GOD. 

this old notion of Ptolemy, which was held as good 
science almost down to our time, has not a single 
supporter — a fact that assures us that even a 
unanimous acceptance of a notion by scientists by 
no means demonstrates it. 

No, " the house I live in " of the sun and planets 
and asteroids and comets is no house at all. It is 
not even a tent. Those celestials are strictly out- 
of-door people. " Thank the gods," said certain 
Germans to Caesar, " we have never slept under 
cover since we were born." So all the solar family 
might say. More than this : they cannot even 
claim a fixed locality. Of all travelers, even in 
this traveling age, these are the ones most persis- 
tently " not at home" : in fact you never can find 
them where they last were. But still it is true 
that the constantly shifting region occupied by 
the solar family always remains very large, no 
member of the household ever approaching an- 
other within thirty millions of miles, and most of 
them separated from their fellows by a vastly 
greater space. If they had been as compactly 
placed as one can imagine, they would have been 
far more likely to interfere with one another and 
so come to grief. 

No doubt the immense intervals between its 
members has something to do with the stability of 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 75 

the solar family. But this stability comes still 
more from another fact, viz., the essential harmony 
that exists between its members. 

We have excellent authority for saying that 
" the contentions of brothers are like the bars of a 
castle " ; also the best of observation proves that 
such contentions not seldom occur. Brothers and 
sisters fall out with one another : parents and 
children wrangle and separate. The same roof 
can no longer cover them. But the solar family is 
thoroughly harmonious within itself : harmony is 
built into its very structure! This is the great 
reason why its members get on so quietly together 
— the planets never having been known to collide 
with one another during the long past, or even to 
threaten to do so. The meteoric clouds belonging 
to the system do indeed sometimes rub against the 
earth ; but they are such shadowy and unsubstan- 
tial things that the only result is a shower of 
shooting stars, more or less brilliant. The earth 
plows its foamy way through them without any 
damage whatever to itself and without the least 
perceptible abatement of its speed. Such collisions 
count for nothing. The family can stand any 
number of them. 

The planets do not even threaten to harm one 
another — to one who knows their habits. Their 



76 THE STARS OF GOD. 

orbits alternately contract and expand ; and when 
one, year after year, gets nearer and nearer to the 
sun the situation naturally seems alarming to the 
uninitiated. But the astronomer now knows that 
there is no danger. The contraction of the orbit 
has a limit. "Thus far shalt thou go and no 
farther." After a few thousand years the mighty 
curve begins to swell out to its old dimensions. 
Its very elasticity, instead of being a threat, is a 
pledge of safety. Like the trees of the forest it 
finds endurance in elasticity, in knowing when to 
yield somewhat to pressure. Men and institutions, 
also, have sometimes saved much by yielding a 
little. 

What, at first view, seem to be family jars in the 
solar family are not so. The pullings in different 
directions that we notice are not oppositions but 
attractions. Some who have studied the matter 
closely have found out that the members of the 
solar family are so attached to one another that 
they have come under bonds not only never to al- 
low differences to proceed to extremities in down- 
right qaarrels, but never to have any differences. 
What go by that name are only the friendly hand- 
pullings that would fain bring lip to lip. They 
are a family safety valve or balance wheel that 
contributes to the general steadfastness. Is not 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 77 

health the equilibrium of seemingly opposing 
forces ? 

Some one has said that nothing so helps to keep 
the peace between neighbors as a wall ten feet 
high. If this is so, we may allow that there is a 
certain element of peacefulness and harmony in 
the vastness of the intervals between the planets. 
But the great cause, I am inclined to think, lies in 
the fact that the Builder of the solar system so 
built harmony into its make-up that all the mem- 
bers are obliged to refer disputes, or what seem 
such, to the sun for arbitration. They have great 
respect for him : his decisions are final. They 
know how to obey the head of the family — a kind 
of knowledge that all minors do not possess. And 
he knows how to rule, and how to obey Him who 
rules over all — a kind of knowledge which all 
heads of families unfortunately do not possess. 

The history of the solar family is one thing ; the 
history of our knowledge of that family is another 
thing. Doubtless every feature of that first history, 
down to the minutest incident, has recorded itself 
somewhere in the universe, and is decipherable 
from the material tablet on which the laws of light 
and gravity and other forces have faithfully 
written it ; but we cannot read this self -registered 
history. Some, however, claim that they have 



7 8 THE STARS OF GOD. 

done so to a considerable extent, and proceed to 
tell us that the family began in an immense fire- 
cloud extending- far beyond the orbit of Neptune : 
that this cloud in cooling began to revolve about 
its centre ; that this revolution in the process of 
cooling at length became so rapid as to detach a 
nebulous ring ; that this ring in time broke up 
and condensed into one or more planets which in 
some cases also threw off rings which condensed 
into moons ; that the ever increasing speed of 
rotation in the fire-cloud kept repeating this pro- 
cess until now we have many planets, and the 
original cloud by successive losses of its substance 
is reduced to the observed size of the sun. Then, 
turning to geology, they proceed to confirm and 
continue this history- by showing that our earth, 
taken as a sample of the other members of the 
family, passed gradually in immense stretches of 
time from at least a fused state to the humbler 
forms of vegetable life and then to the humbler 
forms of animals, and so on until at last we have 
man and the earth as it now is. " From one learn 
all," they say. " Here you have the history of the 
solar family." 

The objections to this supposed history are of 
two sorts. First are certain facts within the sys- 
tem itself; such as the great ellipticity of some 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 79 

of the orbits, the great inclination of some of the 
orbits to the solar equator, the retrograde motion 
of some of the comets and moons, the relation 
as to velocity between the sun's rotation and the 
revolutions of some of the planets, also between 
the rotations of some of the planets and the rev- 
olutions of their moons — Mars furnishing a nota- 
ble example: 

These and many more such difficult facts make 
one sort of objection. Another sort is of a still 
graver character, viz., that the hypothesis if true, 
sets aside the argument from design in the works 
of Nature for the being of a God. Stated plainl) 7 
in one form it teaches that Nature is a natural 
growth from the humblest beginnings, that worlds 
and their organic forms have slowly come up 
from exceedingly simple things by purely natu- 
ral causation. Such at least is the understanding 
of the hypothesis by its leading advocates. This 
is the understanding to the establishment of which 
all their efforts are directed. They insist on a 
natural genetic connection between any two con- 
secutive variations in that long series of small 
variations by which things are supposed to have 
crept up from the simplest structures or from 
elementary atoms to their present state. 



8o THE STARS OF GOD. 

But whatever be the force that actually con- 
ducts Nature slowly upward along the succession 
of minute steps, whether it be natural or super- 
natural, if these steps are such and so minute 
that merely natural forces can easily take them, 
then proof of a God must come from some other 
quarter than from what we have been used to 
call his works. Yet, the Bible says, "The invis- 
ible things of Him from the creation of the world 
are clearly seen being understood by the things 
that are made even his eternal power and god- 
head so that they (the heathen) are without ex- 
cuse." But the) 7 are not without excuse if the 
earth and heavens have been built in such a way 
that not even a philosopher can tell whether Na- 
ture built itself or was built by God. 



VI. 
THE SOLAR FAMILY -III 



SUPERSTITIONS. 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 83 

VI. 

THE SOLAR FAMILY -III. 

SUPERSTITIONS. 

Great and old families are apt to have some 
superstitions connected with them. Some room 
in the castle is haunted ; some wicked or unfor- 
tunate or uncomfortable ancestor walks ; certain 
dates or generations in the family history are 
critical and need watching. There is hardly an 
historic family that has not some superstitions of 
this sort hanging about it. 

The solar family is no exception. It wheels 
into line, and at the head of the line. Spectres, 
portents, lucky and unlucky aspects, dies fasti et 
nefasti, mysteries of Udolpho and Otranto — they 
have all somehow managed to domesticate them- 
selves in the blue dome above. 

I have already noticed some widely spread 
superstitions about the moon; and there are many 
others. For example we are told that the moon 
has a powerful influence on health, on the com- 
plexion, on the weather, on the mind in producing 



8 4 THE STARS OF GOD. 

or modifying insanity, on the proper times of 
planting and reaping and felling timber and 
killing domestic animals. Some things must be 
done in the old of the moon, some things in the 
new, and some in the full. Country people have 
heard that medicinal herbs gathered when the 
moon increases have the most virtue; that cucum- 
bers grow best at full moon, while onions do best 
in the moon's decline ; that vines trimmed at 
night, when the moon is in Leo, will be most 
likely to escape field rats and other gnawing an- 
imals. 

From time out of mind such notions about our 
satellite appear to have prevailed widely among 
all classes, not excepting philosophers and scien- 
tists. The first lunar tables computed according 
to the Newtonian theory of gravity were intended 
for astrological purposes ; and the weather alma- 
nacs, of which a few survive, were the practical 
science of such journals as the Connaisance des Temps 
less than two hundred years ago. Mortifying, is 
it not ? Science has sometimes stooped before 
conquering. 

But the moon is not the only member of the 
solar family that has been saddled with a great 
double pack of superstitions. Fortunately she 
has been able to hold on her way with unabated 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 85 

pace notwithstanding the unreasonable load. Some 
even say^that all the while she has been going 
faster. I have no doubt they are right. But all 
along she had the encouragement of good and 
sympathizing company. Every one of the plan- 
ets, except those lately discovered, has had a like 
burden to carry and has carried it equally well. 
Uranus and Neptune had a great escape by keep- 
ing in the dark as long as they did. Astrology 
would have kept them hard at work predicting 
the fates of men who, for the most part, were 
beneath their notice. 

See how the ages, until lately, have been talking 
about the older planets ! I say until lately; but 
even now, in our metropolitan newspapers, the 
advertisements of astrologers may sometimes be 
found. For a dollar or so, one may learn whether 
or not the planets smiled on his birth ; also when 
the critical times of his life may be expected. 
But the superstitions that now lurk only in cor- 
ners, and shady ones at that, only a little while 
ago walked the w T hole earth in broad day and 
robes of honor, bowled along boulevards in char- 
iots of bronze, and lifted unabashed front in the 
halls of learning and the councils of kings. No 
great enterprise was undertaken without consult- 
ing the planets. No one ventured to open his 



S6 THE STARS OF GOD. 

lips against this science of the day. Did not even 
the Bible confirm it — the Bible that says, " The 
stars in their courses fought against Sisera ?" 

Each planet was supposed to influence the for- 
tunes of men according to the times of their 
births. If Jupiter was in the first sign of the 
Zodiac at the birth, the child would have high 
station : if Mars, his career would be violent and 
quarrelsome ; if Venus, he would be favored in 
the matter of accomplishments and love : if Mer- 
cury, he would be ingenious and cunning, perhaps 
eloquent and learned. Mars was thought to be a 
very unlucky planet to be born under; but Saturn 
was the unluckiest of all. Nothing but misfor- 
tune for the child that happened to be born under 
its influence ! If at that time the planet chanced 
to be in the zodiacal sign of the month, the very 
worst sort of a career was to be expected for the 
youngster. He was foreordained to disaster, and 
oceans of it. Parents threw up their hands in 
despair. Nothing could be done for him. Hope 
forsook him, and of course every thing else did. 

Just think of it ! Such baseless notions as these 
were held almost unchallenged for thousands of 
years, among the most scholarly and enlightened, 
from far beyond the time when in Egypt and 
Chaldea astrologers were a standing part of the 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 87 

equipment of governments ! All in the name of 
the highest science too ! We are ashamed to 
confess it — but facts are stubborn things. And 
we must bow to the stubbornness of facts. It is 
some consolation to know that Joseph and Daniel 
belonged to a different order of wise men from 
that which divined by the stars. 

"We open here a new budget," as says the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer — the budget of the 
eclipses. It is only yesterday, as it were, when the 
general public of the best countries came to know 
that eclipses of the sun were caused by the moon 
coming in between us and the sun, and eclipses of 
the moon by its passing through the earth's 
shadow. For untold stretches of years before, 
they passed for heavenly predictions of earthly 
disaster, for tokens of divine wrath and banners 
of advancing judgment on princes and peoples. 
Especially was this idea held about total eclipses 
of the sun. These totals have been wont to set 
mankind aghast. " A dragon is eating up the 
sun," said savages ; and they tried to drive the 
monster away with shouts and various din. 
" Heaven is angry with us for our sins, and warns 
the Son of Heaven to look up his faults and cor- 
rect them," said the Chinese chief mandarin ; and 
the whole empire prostrated itself and remains 



<S8 THE STARS OF GOD. 

prostrate till now. And in more classic countries, 
from the time of Nicias in Sicily and of Alexander 
at Arbela down to times that have hardly yet 
gone below the horizon, seditions have been 
quelled, defeats suffered, victories won, govern- 
ments unsettled, whole nations sent to their knees 
by such signs of divine wrath. No doubt the wrath 
was real; for the ages have been awfully wicked — 
only the eclipses were no proof of the wrath. But 
there were other proofs and plenty of them. The 
universal consciousness of guilt is itself enough to 
set the heavens aflame, much more to eclipse all 
the stars. 

"A spirit passed before my face; the hair of my 
flesh stood up." Not long ago the hair of almost 
everybody was as electrical as that of Eliphaz the 
Temanite. They saw a spirit among the stars. 
What else could it be — that weird and ghostly 
thing that had so suddenly appeared in the sky 
with the fierce face and snaky tresses of Tisiphone ! 

From time to time men have looked up and seen 
a hazy object with a starlike nucleus and a streamer 
extending a long distance. What was it? It 
looked spectral — a ghostly monster bent on ravage 
and ruin, and moving among the stars at a furious 
pace and with a ferocious aspect. Is it not a mes- 
senger from an angry God to announce hastening 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 89 

judgments ? The phantom in itself was sufficiently 
grim: and it was easy for people always haunted 
by the consciousness of guilt to fancy additional 
terrors in its aspect. Curious pictures have come 
down to us from the Middle Ages of comets as 
they seemed to the terrified vision of the time. 
Cruel malevolence, savage ferocity, vindictive hate, 
fiendish mockery, outrageous passion, stark and 
raving insanity — all were depicted or attempted 
in those rude representations, half ludicrous and 
wholly horrible. The pictures are no photogrophs. 
The eye gave the outlines; a terrified imagination 
did the rest. And what a painter a frightened 
imagination is ! 

The rest was indeed frightful. No wonder the 
people feared the worst. No wonder that the vul- 
gar went wild. Pestilence and war on a great 
scale were at hand. Everything bad was knock- 
ing at the door of the nations. Thrones would 
topple, armies would sink in bloody graves. Death 
on the pale horse of the plague or famine or earth- 
quake would ride forth on his fearful errand. 
The hair of nations stood up. Their knees smote 
together. Cold, clammy sweat stood on their 
brows. Men's hearts failed them for fear and for 
looking after the things that are coming on the 
earth. What terror-smitten faces were turned up 



9o THE STARS OF GOD. 

to the portentous stranger of 1680 from cabins and 
halls and castles and palaces — from under the 
matted hair of serfs, the plumed hats of gentry, 
the serge cowls of monks, the steel morions of sol- 
diers, and the jeweled crowns of kings! It means 
you, O oppressive and voluptuous monarch! It 
means you, O subjects imbruted, and God-defying! 
Those who were not dismayed at the heavenly 
sign were counted hardened sinners who could 
reasonably be taken in hand by the magistrate. 

Thus it was for many weary centuries. Here 
and there a man, like Seneca, held juster views: 
and indeed juster views were also held by the 
early Chaldean and Greek astronomers. But then 
came a great scientific backsliding which lasted for 
millenniums. What! scientists mistaken! What! 
scientists almost or quite unanimous in the mis- 
take and for so long a time, too! Yes, we must 
confess it, though very reluctantly. Religion has 
no monopoly of backsliding. The same science 
that fell from grace and the Pythagorean view of 
the solar system into the Ptolemaic, and remained 
fallen so long, soon fell away from the true view 
of comets and lay quite as prostrate as the general 
public. From the birth of Christ some five hun- 
dred comets have been recorded: and in regard to 
most of them observers of everv grade have, until 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 91 

lately, had but one opinion. They were thought 
supernational visitors. They were either the in- 
nictors or the prophets of divine judgments. No- 
body thought that they meant nothing or meant 
good. Everybody thought they meant evil, and 
evil on a great scale — public disaster, ruin to 
monarchs, kingdoms, continents. Of course this 
thought still remains among hundreds of millions 
who are still barbarous or semi-civilized. 

See how the celebrated surgeon, Ambroise Pare, 
describes the comet of 1528. "This comet was so 
horrible and dreadful that it engendered such 
great terror to the people that they died, some 
with fear, others with illness. It appeared to be 
of immense length and of blood color; at its head 
was seen the figure of a curved arm holding a 
large sword in its hand, as if it wished to strike. 
At the point of the sword were three stars, and on 
either side were seen a great number of hatchets, 
knives, and swords covered with blood, among 
which were numerous hideous human faces with 
bristling beards and hair." 

But perhaps no comet is responsible for so much 
consternation as Halley's. It has appeared twenty- 
four times during the Christian era. Of its appear- 
ance in 837 a French writer wrote thus: "During 
the holy days of Easter a phenomenon ever fatal 



92 THE STARS OF GOD. 

and of gloomy forebodings, appeared in the heav- 
ens." It was supposed to predict the death of 
Louis le Debonnaire, which took place shortly 
after. 

Its appearance in 1066, when the Normans in- 
vaded England, was supposed to predict the defeat 
and subjection at the disastrous battle of Hastings. 
In 1455 it appeared again. At that time the Turks 
were threatening Europe. Constantinople had 
been taken by storm and the siege of Belgrade 
raised. Pope Calixtus III., summoned the chivalry 
of Europe to arms. The Mohammedan East and 
the Christian West stood confronting each other 
with lifted scimetars and battle axes. The embat- 
tled hosts looked up and saw the comet. Whose 
ruin did it portend ? To make all sure the pontiff 
fulminated a bull against the comet and bespoke 
its curses for the enemy. The enemy got them. 
In the great battle that followed the crescent lost 
and the cross won. Europe was saved. 

At last, and quite too late, our astronomy has 
shown that such notions in regard to comets are 
mere superstitions. We can look up with great 
composure, though not without great interest, on 
the most truculent looking celestial phantom that 
ever frightened the nations. We now know that 
these Eumenides are nothing but masses of cloud- 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 93 

like matter belonging to the solar family; masses 
so extremely tenuous that if they should rush into 
the earth we should suffer no disturbance beyond 
what a brilliant display of shooting stars would 
make. 

The comets move in calculable orbits about the 
sun according to the same laws that govern the 
planets; and the times of their returns to us have 
often been foretold with great exactness. The 
very constitution of some of them when in a state 
of incandescence has been found by means of 
the spectroscope, and found to consist of not more 
than three gases, mostly carbon and hydrogen. 
Also, the various aspects and movements that 
they show, are, in the main, such as masses of 
extremely tenuous matter circulating about the 
sun in extremely elliptical orbits would necessarily 
show. They become visible only when near the 
sun; when first visible through the telescope they 
are mere cloudlets of uniform appearance; as they 
come nearer to us in their advance towards the 
sun they brighten more and more, move faster 
and faster, show central condensation more and 
more clearly, and their substance gradually ex- 
pands into streamers, sometimes of enormous 
length, through which the faintest stars can be 
seen. As they retreat from the sun this order is 



94 THE STARS OF GOD. 

reversed, and the prodigal sons, as usual, come out 
at the little end of the horn. 

All this is what we should expect of misty 
cloudlike matter in course of circulation about the 
sun on very eccentric orbits. Comets are fellows 
of the planets, children of the same solar family: 
or at least its life-long domestics and feudal re- 
tainers. Though unsubstantial children of the 
mist they obey the laws of gravity, respect the 
three famous statutes of Kepler, and submit to the 
central authority of the sun as w r ell as do the most 
solid members of the shining household. 

It is true that in some respects besides their 
unsubstantial character the comets are very un- 
like the planets. To all appearance the) 7 are the 
nighty, erratic, dissipated vagabonds of the system 
— its prodigal sons, ever dashing away on their 
mighty sprees to far countries and at last return- 
ing with inflamed faces and dishevelled hair and 
tattered garments toward the father's house. 
The cometary orbits lie at all angles to ours, and 
are generally so extremely eccentric as to subject 
them to wonderful extremes of temperature and 
motion — facts not easily explained on the nebular 
hypothesis. The comet of 1843, for example, 
almost brushed the sun with its fiery tresses, and 
then, as if in mortal terror at its audacity, rushed 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 95 

away at the rate of 1,200,000 miles an hour toward 
the frozen regions far beyond the orbit of Nep- 
tune, where its pace is only a few yards an hour. 
Despite the proverb, such extremes never meet. 
They are like the extremes of some erratic Chris- 
tians — now very hot and now very cold, now very 
fast and now very slow, now very near the Sun 
and now so far away that it seems as if they 
would never get back; and yet real members of 
the household of faith and bound to return, though 
it be in a very shattered and tattered condition. 

The comets are subject to various diversities and 
changes of aspect which have not as yet been ex- 
plained. The ideal comet, when in full parade 
uniform and well behaved, — appears with a bright, 
eyelike nucleus in a hairy envelope from which 
streams out a prodigious pennon or tail. But 
comets do not always appear in parade dress. 
They are not always well behaved. Sometimes 
they omit the bright cyclopean eye, sometimes the 
hazy envelope, sometimes the tail; and the tail 
when present appears in very different forms. 
Now it is straight, now curved, now like a fan 
more or less opened, now like a sword, now like a 
giant club, now like the long dishevelled and 
storm-tossed tresses of a classical Fury. Some- 
times all these varieties appear in the same comet 



96 THE STARS OF GOD. 

during successive trips about the sun; for example, 
in Halley's comet in its returns in 1456, 1682, 1759, 
1835. The head of a comet has been known to 
split asunder as if by the axe of some invisible 
Vulcan, though no wise goddess ever appeared as 
the result. 

We cannot as yet well explain these strange be- 
haviors; which have done much to promote super- 
stitious fears. Speculations have been plentiful 
enough; but as yet science has been invoked in 
vain. But this is not disturbing. Rather it is 
stimulating. It is after the historic manner of 
our progress in the knowledge of nature. Satis- 
factory explanations, will be reached by and by 
after much sifting and winnowing. Oh for a wind 
just strong enough to blow away the chaff and 
leave the wheat! Methinks I hear it rising now. 
Soon it will be here. And meanwhile we see 
clearly that there is a great difference between 
the unexplained, and even the unexplainable, and 
the supernatural. 

Do I deny that comets are supernatural ? By 
no means. Nature itself is supernatural. 



VII. 

THE SOLAR FAMILY-IV. 



INHABITANTS? 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 99 

VII. 

THE SOLAR FAMILY-IV. 

INHABITANTS. 

Are the planets inhabited? 

I suppose that most astronomers are inclined to 
answer this question in the affirmative as to some 
of the planets; and that they would say in regard 
to all of them that they either are, or have been, 
or will be, the abodes of living beings. 

The reasons for this guarded statement are found 
in the history of our own planet. Geology shows 
that there was a long time during which no living 
beings existed on the earth — a time in which the 
earth was only in course of preparation as a habi- 
tation. And our Scriptures tell us that the time 
will come (apparently a brief one) when the earth 
will no longer be inhabited. So we who believe 
in both the Bible and Geology — wholly in the 
Bible and partly in Geology — are not prepared to 
affirm that all the planets are, just now, the homes 
of living beings. They may be, and they may not 
be. We see no valid ground for maintaining that 



ioo THE STARS OF GOD. 

they are at this moment unoccupied by rational 
and responsible beings. But all that we affirm is 
that they were made to be inhabited at some time. 

As yet we have no instruments that can look in 
upon even the nearest planet so as to discover 
such beings as men, or their works, if they exist 
there. The time may come when we can do this, 
and some think that it is even now at the doors 
by means of photography; but it has not lifted 
knocker yet. As yet we cannot recognize any 
great artificial structures, like pyramids or cathe- 
drals or Grand Centrals, anywhere outside of our 
own world — much less the builders of such things. 

Since, then, we cannot see whether there are 
living beings on the planets, how do we justify 
ourselves in believing that they are, or have been, 
or will be, inhabited ? 

There are several lines of argument. The one 
I will present is none the worse for having a 
spice of religion about it. 

God made all the heavenly bodies. They are 
not eternal. They did not come by chance, nor 
by mere natural law. They came at the word of 
Him who " spake and it was done, who commanded 
and it stood fast." " In the beginning God created 
the heavens and the earth." 



THE SOLAR FAMIL Y. i o i 

If God made the planets what did He make 
them for? Certainly He had an object in view. 
As certainly this object was one worthy of the 
outlay to secure it. Did he make these great 
globes and send them on their glorious rounds 
about the sun in order to add a few more orna- 
mental points to our evening sky? Was it to 
exercise the curiosity and patience of a handful 
of astronomers? The world is at last well re- 
covered from the idea that we are the centre of 
the universe, and that the stars were made for our 
benefit, especially so small a benefit. We are 
more than convalescing from that stubborn dis- 
temper of the ages. To us at the present day it 
goes without saying that the outlay of power and 
wisdom on the planets is too immense for so 
paltry an end. What, then, can be the object of 
the planets ? 

As to the object of one of them, namely the earth, 
we have Divine information. "For thus saith the 
Lord that created the heavens; God himself that 
formed the earth and made it, he hath established 
it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be in- 
habited." Of course to be inhabited in the way it 
actually is, by innumerable forms of animal life 
culminating in rational and moral beings. Man 
is the chief figure in this comprehensive object. 



io2 THE STARS OF GOD. 

Other things are relatively worthless. It was, 
therefore, chiefly for him that the earth was made. 
Accordingly it is written: "The earth has he 
given to the children of men." 

Now look at our neighbor Mars. It seems 
almost a duplicate of the earth. Behold land, 
water, and air! Behold clouds, rains, snows! Be- 
hold continents, oceans, lakes! Behold days and 
seasons and mean temperature very well answer- 
ing to our own ! And then the newly discoverd 
moons ! A map of Mars much resembles a map 
of the earth in its general features — thpugh with 
more land than water. There seems no reason 
why, if our animated tribes could be transferred 
across the abyss to that next door neighbor of 
ours, nearly all of them could not have homes 
assigned them agreeing very well with those they 
now occupy. How natural to infer that a globe 
so much like our own was made for a like purpose 
— made to be inhabited! We do not need to draw 
the inference — the inference draws us. If a cer- 
tain builder has made two contiguous houses so 
much alike that one can hardly tell one from the 
other; and one of them is known to have been 
meant for a dwelling house, and to be actually 
occupied as such; how natural and indeed impera- 
tive is the conclusion that the other structure is 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 103 

meant for the same purpose — whether at present 
occupied or not! 

Almost as much can reasonably be said of beau- 
tiful Venus — the nearest neighbor on the other 
side of us. Though its surface is not as clear to 
us as is that of Mars, it is morally certain that it 
would be equally habitable for terrestrial life. 

We have, then, at least three planets which the 
Creator made to be inhabited. This creates a 
strong presumption that the object of the other 
planets — so like to these in great cosmical fea- 
tures and arrangements — is the same. But here 
some feel a difficulty; best recognized in the case 
of the two extreme planets, Mercury and Neptune. 
The one is so near the sun that the mean amount 
of light and heat which it gets from that luminary 
is seven times what the earth receives. On the 
other hand Neptune is so far away from the sun 
that it receives only about the eight hundredth 
part of the heat and light that we do. How can 
life exist under such conditions — the terrible oven 
on the one hand and the terrible refrigerator on 
the other! Our answer is that the temperature of 
a planet and the amount of light it has do not 
depend solely on its distance from the sun; they 
also depend much on the sort and depth of its 
atmosphere; the number, distance, and structure 



io 4 THE STARS OF GOB. 

of its moons; the nature of its soil; and especially 
its amount of internal fires. By changing the 
condition of the earth as to these matters, as we 
may suppose it to be changed, we could easily 
raise or lower its temperature and amount, of 
light very largely, indeed to almost any extent. 
So every planet in the system may be furnished 
with climate and light not unsuited to the terres- 
trial races of living beings. 

But why say terrestrial races — as if there could 
be no other forms of living being than such as are 
found in our world! Who has a right to say 
either that God could not, or that He would not 
make beings adapted to live and thrive in widely 
different physical conditions from our own! Must 
all living creatures be made after the earthly 
patterns? Has the Omniscient and Almighty 
such poverty of resources ? Can he not make 
races that can live and nourish in the airless and 
waterless moon (we are by no means sure that our 
moon is so poverty-stricken) as well as we do 
here — as well even in the furnace of the sun with 
its thousands of blazing equators as we on our 
temperate zones? Could He not people worlds 
with pure spirits, or with beings whose etherial 
bodies so closely border on the spiritual as to be 
almost independent of material surroundings? 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 105 

There is but one answer which a believer in the 
God of the Bible can give to such questions. 

What magnificent bodies some of the remoter 
planets are? What a glory of magnitude and 
moons waits on them ? Think of Saturn with its 
wonderful ring and eight moons ; together making 
such an evening sky as never arched the earth. 
Can it be that the largest and most beautiful 
worlds in our system were made for a purpose less 
considerable than our own — that God has framed 
such palaces for emptiness, or the vegetable, or 
the worm, while " giving the earth to the children 
of men!" We answer No — in the name of the 
eternal beauty and fitness of things. 

These views are practically universal, not only 
among Christian astronomers, but among scientists' 
of all shades of religious opinion. What a waste 
of power and grandeur if our own little world is 
the only inhabited one ? But it is seen that Nature 
is not wont to waste herself in this profitless and 
prodigal fashion; to make this much ado about 
nothing. Accordingly, even infidels are in the 
habit of maintaining the plurality of inhabited 
worlds; and have sought in the fact arms against 
the Bible. These men are generally radical evo- 
lutionists, and so are compelled to say that, inas- 
much as all planets have been formed under 



106 THE STARS OF GOD. 

precisely the same natural laws and in precisely 
the same manner, their histories must be sub- 
stantially the same with that of our world — a 
world that has been pushed forward from one 
grade of population to another until at last it has 
reached men. 

And yet it is not common in our day for astron- 
omical text books to express any opinion as to the 
object for which the planets were made. It is 
thought to be in bad taste. It is thought to be 
unscientific. Professional scientists are almost as 
much afraid of mixing up religion with science as 
professional politicians are of mixing it up with 
politics. But Sir Isaac Xewton did not think it 
unscientific to acknowledge God and final causes 
•in the very presence of the Calculus. And Sir 
John Herschel, a man of kindred genius and 
attainment, .did not hesitate to write to young 
people as follows: "For what purpose are we to 
suppose such magnificent bodies scattered through 
the abyss of space? He must have studied astron- 
omy to little purpose who can suppose man to be 
the only object of his Creator's care, or who does 
not see in the vast and wonderful apparatus around 
us provision for other races of animated beings." 

But it is time to move on. So good bye to the 
Solar Familv — that laro-e, brilliant, and ancient 



THE SOLAR FAMILY. 107 

family; that family which at first view seems so 
vagrant and lawless but which on closer examina- 
tion turns out to be harmonious and well-behaved 
and well-governed in the last degree; never re- 
belling, never playing truant, never seriously dis- 
obeying the Sun in any respect though all are so 
headstrong and flighty by nature and some of them 
so eccentric in their bias that if the Sun should not 
keep a strong hand on them they would rush away 
into all sorts of mischief, carrying with them the 
fates of vast populations. But the Sun does keep 
a strong hand and a steady. The sire is no weak- 
ling. He is a miracle of quiet firmness. His 
children have to behave themselves. And so quiet 
and safety and order reign because subordination 
reigns. 



VIII. 
Other Solar Families— I 



CREDIBLE. 

MANY. 

DISTANT. 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. in 

VIII. 

OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES-I. 

CREDIBLE MANY DISTANT. 

Is our Solar Family the only one ? In all the 
round of the heavens is there no other sun circled 
by its own system of dependent worlds ? 

Some people can see only themselves: and very 
near-sighted people they are. Others manage to 
see in addition their own family — nothing more. 
But there are others who are not content with so 
narrow a ran^e of vision; who, lookino- awav 
beyond themselves and their own immediate 
household, succeed in finding' that there are other 
households, and many of them as important and 
w T orthy of attention as their own. 

To this last class astronomers belong. Thev 
have looked away far beyond their own star, far 
beyond the family of stars to which they belong, 
and have found millions on millions of other solar 
families many of which would seem to be more 
magnificent than their own. 

Of these I will now speak. 



ii2 THE STARS OF GOD. 

Every fixed star is a sun. If our sun could be 
carried away from us indefinitely it would lessen 
and lessen on our sight until at last it would 
appear like any fixed star — a mere point on the 
sky, incapable of being magnified by any tele- 
scope, and unchangeable in position to any com- 
mon observation. This suggests that all the 
fixed stars may be vast suns belittled to the eye 
by distance. But, on examining the quality of 
their light by the spectroscope and other means, 
we find the suggestion emphasized into knowl- 
edge. Their light, like that of our sun, is the light 
of incandescent bodies; and the material that is 
glowing in them is, to a certain extent, like that 
which glows in our own luminary. So it is plain 
that if any fixed star could be made to approach 
us it would gradually brighten and expand on our 
sight until at last it would appear as large as our 
sun and would affect us similarly as to light and 
heat. 

So all the fixed stars are suns. Have they 
planets about them ? 

The most eminent astronomers, like Newton 
and La Place and Arago and Bessel and Struve 
and the two Herschels, have not hesitated to 
answer in the affirmative. I do not know of a 
single astronomer who maintains a negative. The 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 113 

considerations weighing with such men are vari- 
ous. Some of the stars, under the best telescopes, 
appear with minute companions that have been 
suspected to shine by reflected light. Others show 
certain delicate disturbances of position such as 
would be produced by the attractions of near 
planets. But the great reason, no doubt, lies in 
the analogy of our own system, and in that sense 
of the beautiful and fitting- that rules in all true 
scientists, but especially in those believing in a 
personal God. Such men cannot conceive of any 
other equally fitting purpose for such bodies. That 
such immense spheres, as these suns must be that 
never change their place to common observation, 
were created merely to decorate our evening sky, 
is neither believed nor believable at the present 
day. If they were made to be sources of light and 
heat and government to schemes of dependent and 
habitable worlds, the end is worthy of the outlay. 
and our sense of the eternal beauty and fitness of 
things is satisfied. Accordingly, there is, probably, 
not a single astronomer who believes in Him who 
made the stars who does not also believe that 
each star is a sun belted with planets designed for 
habitations. More than this. Even agnostics and 
atheists are accustomed to regard the stars as 
representing so many planetary systems. It is a 



ii4 THE STARS OF GOD. 

necessary corollary from that nebular hypothesis 
that is such a favorite with all sorts of unbelievers, 
but especially with those of the red-republican 
stamp. "By the laws of Nature," say they, " a 
sun is the head of a family — is a sire and perhaps 
'a grandsire." 

So we are to consider that there are as many 
Solar Families as there are fixed stars. Each 
fixed star is a sun and if, like our sun, it is a 
locomotive world, it masterfully drags after it 
wherever it goes a train of dependent worlds 
indissolubly coupled with it and with one another. 

HOW MANY ARE THEY ? 

The taking of a large census — I mean an accurate 
one — is no easy matter anywhere, whether in the 
heavens or on the earth. Say on the earth. The 
work has to be committed to many persons, some 
of whom have a genius for accuracy and others a 
genius for blunders. The districts canvassed some- 
times overlap one another and sometimes they fall 
short. In lonely places, on the borders of towns, 
some people are overlooked; still more escape 
notice in the greater loneliness of crowded cities. 
Crowds are coming and going, streaming this 
way and that, hiding in garrets and cellars — how 
can they be surely counted ? To be sure one may 
count the houses, and, with difficulty, the rooms in 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 115 

them; but how many waifs have no houses or 
rooms to shelter them, and, of those who have 
something- of the sort, how many are unwilling to 
report themselves and their miseries! Rather 
than enter some pestiferous dens the census-taker 
is tempted to guess at their contents, or to take 
them on testimon3 T as wide of the mark as drunk- 
enness and roguery can make it. So there is 
always a margin of uncertainty in the official 
returns of population for any large nation. This, 
however, we do not mind. Approximations to 
truth are sometimes about as good as the truth 
itself. In fact we had rather have 3.14159 as 
expressing the ratio of the circumference of a 
circle to its diameter than to have the same figures 
pushed into complete accuracy by the addition to 
them of an infinite number of decimals. What 
matters a mistake of a few hundreds or thousands 
in a census of sixty odd millions! 

Like difficulties are found in taking a census of 
the fixed stars. The work has to be divided up 
among observers in two hemispheres; and it is not 
eas3' to guard against either overlapping- or over- 
looking. Some observers are patient and careful; 
and others are otherwise. We are not troubled 
by the stars moving about in all directions, as do 
the people in our cities — for intakes very close and 



n6 THE STARS OF GOD. 

long continued observation to detect in them any 
motion whatever — still it is a hard matter to count 
them when they are crowded together, or when 
they lie on the frontiers of vision. On these fron- 
tiers the stars are so faint that we are uncertain 
whether they are stars at all. So a celestial cen- 
sus, like an earthly, is liable to a certain amount of 
error. But no matter. A few thousands, or even 
millions, of stars, more or less, are of little account 
in estimating the immense celestial populations. 

I say immense. There can be no question about 
that. Before telescopes a vague look at the even- 
ing sky gave the impression of an innumerable 
number of bright points: and to-day the same 
impression is given to the great masses of man- 
kind as they glance upward. And this impression 
is correct. "As many as the stars of the sky in 
multitude and as the sands of the sea-shore 
innumerable," say the Scriptures; and our latest 
science says the same. For though, on proceeding 
to individualize the stars visible to the naked eye, 
we can only make out five or six thousands, on 
calling the telescope to our aid we find the num- 
ber greatly enlarged, and the larger the telescope 
the greater the shining hosts revealed, until now 
the number within reach of our keenest-eyed 
instrument is estimated at one hundred millions. 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 117 

Is this all ? Apparently all the stars just men- 
tioned belong to the Milky way, or that particular 
firmament of stars in which our sun is imbedded: 
but, all along, every successive advance in the 
space penetrating power of our instruments has 
brought to light what seem other firmaments as 
large and glorious as our own. Have we reached 
the frontier of the stellar heavens just as our 
object glasses have reached a diameter of little 
over three feet? Very unlikely indeed — millions 
of chances to one against it. If such has been the 
law of our intercourse with the heavens from the 
time when Galileo turned his pigmy object-glass 
on the sky to the present when the Earl of Rosse 
turns upward his gigantic six feet speculum, are 
we not entitled to feel that we might still go on 
indefinitely adding host to hosts? In short we 
seem forbidden by experience to set limits to the 
number of the stars — especially since photography 
has come to the aid of the telescope. 

This, then, is our answer to the question. How 
many Solar Families besides our own ? Perhaps 
one hundred millions distinctly in view; and this 
the beginning only of the glorious census. For 
one I have no idea that any arithmetic intelligible 
to us could write down the mighty total. The 
universe of suns and worlds is practically and 



nS THE STARS OF GOD. 

potentially infinite. The ancients were right — the 
heavens are full of eyes. I donbt whether the 
fleetest and oldest angel ever saw a star beyond 
which there was no other. I doubt whether there 
is such a star. The universe is great — its Maker 
only is greater. 

How many are the stars ? The Science of Num- 
ber, tablets in hand, ascends the loftiest Nebo of 
observation furnished by any world and looks 
abroad over the immensities to take the mighty 
census. She faces north and south and east and 
west; she looks upward and downward, near and 
far. She . turns pale. The stylus drops from her 
trembling fingers. In mingled astonishment and 
bewilderment she flings her hands heavenward 
and exclaimes: "Impossible! This census-taking 
is infinitely beyond me. Xot even my elder sister 
who dwells among the angels is equal to such a 
feat as this — only He who made the heavens, and 
of whose intelligence we sciences are but sparks, 
can do it. He counteth the number of the stars 
and calleth them ail by their names." 

So much for the number of the stars. And we 
are to bear in mind that this means not merely an 
incalculable number of spangles on the ebony 
vault of our night, not merely uncountable bon- 
fires in the frozen wastes of space, not merely so 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. no 

many glorious suns in size and splendor, but so 
many systems of revolving and habitable worlds. 
Ahasuerus reigned over a hundred and twenty- 
seven provinces, and they called him the Great 
King: what name shall we give to the King whose 
provinces not even the angels can number, and 
whose every province is a confederacy of worlds ? 

Turning from the number of the Solar Families 
to their distances, we ask: 

Ho~ii> far are they from us and from one another ? 

It is only a few years ago when the only possi- 
ble answer to this question would have been, 
"They are all more than 200,000 sun-distances 
from us: " and the answer would have been justi- 
fied by the fact that if any star were nearer to us 
than this its apparent place on the sky would be 
changed one second of arc, by our passing through 
half of the earth's orbit. So large a displacement 
had not then been found. Nor has it been found 
since. But since then better instruments and bet- 
ter methods have enabled us to recognize smaller 
displacements — first in the star called 61 Cygni, and 
afterward in several other stars. The nearest of 
these, Alpha Centaur i is more than 18 billions of 
miles away from us — a distance so great that light, 
traveling at the rate of 186,000 miles a second, 
consumes more than three years in passing from it 



i2o THE STARS OF GOD. 

to us. Sirius is more than sixteen years distant, 
Arcturus more than twenty-four years, and our 
Pole star more than forty years. And so on into 
hundreds and thousands of years. There are stars 
whose light has been spurring toward us on a 
straight line ever since the creation of man and 
has not yet reached us. "Nay, there are among the 
stars visible in our larger telescopes some which 
if annihilated just now would continue to appear 
in our sky for millions of years. 

So we see that our Solar Family is spaced off 
from every other after a wonderful manner. And 
this probably correctly represents the average 
abyss between the Solar Families. What an 
amazing abyss it is ! The stars are fond of society, 
as we shall see further on, but they do not like to 
come into very close quarters with one another — 
do not like to be embraced and kissed on both 
cheeks by their neighbors. Their mutual regards 
are on the Keep your distance principle. 

We have heard of a city of magnificent distances. 
This seems absurd to us — to us who have seen on 
what scale the heavens are built. How the mighty 
spaces swallow up all our petty earthly units of 
dimension: and even those in use between the 
members of our Solar Family! The people who 
hurry about the earth in our day and get quite a 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 121 

name as travelers, seem mere snails or fixtures as 
we think of the travel implied in journeying to the 
nearest fixed star. A family sets itself down on 
one of our western prairies, and complains that it 
finds itself fifty miles from a neighbor. Prepos- 
terous! What if it should find itself 360,000 mil- 
lion times that distance from the nearest house! 
Then it might well call itself a hermit, and feel 
cut off from society. Ye who scamper round the 
world in ninety days and make nothing of it, what 
say you to an outing and a scamper at the same 
brisk pace to Alpha Centatiri? It will only take 
you 1 80 millions of years, and what are they to an 
immortality, or to one whose business it is to kill 
time! 

That solitary western settler is able to console 
himself in his solitude with the idea that it will 
probably be very short-lived, and that even 
to-morrow may see the fifty miles of his isolation 
dwindled to as many rods. But no Solar Family 
can have such a consolation as it strains its gaze 
across the enormous sky-prairie to where dwells 
its nearest neighbor. It will never see that nearest 
star one bit nearer. Perhaps it does not want to. 
Perhaps it sees that any closer neighborhood 
might be troublesome. Proximities in the heav- 
ens, as well as on the earth, threaten complications. 



i22 THE STARS OF GOD. 

It takes no little care in our crowded human society 
to get along without embarrassments and entangle- 
ments. And, doubtless, the Solar Families cannot 
afford to get very near to one another. Distance 
is the condition of safety. They must not come 
to close quarters. They must give one another 
a wide berth. Else something dreadful would 
happen. If we should find even pleasant-faced 
Arcturus with his fleet of worlds approaching us 
under full sail, and year by year swelling on our 
sight till as large as the sun and larger, we should 
be alarmed and have reason to be. An indigna- 
tion meeting of all the planets would be held; the 
Sun presiding. They would pass resolutions of 
the strongest kind against immigration, and then 
with one consent would rush to repel the immi- 
grant and would destroy themselves in destroying 
him. 

When we think of the almost immeasurable in- 
tervals between the Solar Families do we get the 
impression of an awful loneliness for each — as we 
do when we see an island parted from other lands 
by vast stretches of stormy ocean ? Let us dis- 
miss the impression. We are not entitled to it. 
Who knows that the luminous islands above are so 
many shut-in societies — are so many everlasting 
quarantine grounds ? No one. The islands of 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 123 

this world are musical with the plash and dash of 
oceans over which come and go the white fleets of 
commerce and empire, and under which pass the 
electric cables of constant intercourse with all 
lands — may it not be so with the shining archi- 
pelagos of the greater deep above us ? May not 
they be musically lapped by an ocean of ether 
rilling all the stellar spaces; and may not a vast 
system of inter-communication be actively in play 
between the orbs lying so immensely apart ? It is 
true that we hear nothing of the plash and dash of 
those almost spiritual waves — see nothing of ethe- 
rial fleets going and coming over submerged 
highways of thought and speech on which the 
lightning runs express from star to star. And yet 
in that vast Polynesia above us not a single island 
but is in close sympathy and intercourse with all 
its sister islands. Gravitations innumerable web 
together the most distant stars. Light is a mag- 
nificent and everlasting go-between; and its trains 
come and go at all hours of the day and night. 
Light is the universal language among the Solar 
Families. Between star and star, photographs are 
being exchanged every moment. The latest events 
in each are being telegraphed on sunbeams to 
every other. And it would not be so very strange 
if some one should bv and bv discover that the 



i2 4 THE STARS OF GOD. 

stellar spaces are traversed by great gulf -streams 
of energy more swift and potential than even light 
and gravity. And, let us not forget the holy 
angels, those mighty travelers who minister to the 
heirs of salvation. 

How distances on the earth dwindle to growing- 
children ? How they have dwindled to all within 
the memory of men now living, as ease and speed 
of inter-communication have improved! Is it too 
much to hope that the time will come to the good 
man when his immortal wings will easily bridge 
in a moment even such mighty chasms as part star 
from star! Nay, O soul, thou canst spin a suspen- 
sion bridge, as the spider does, out of thyself (out 
of thine own holy thoughts, feelings, purposes, 
character) and thou shalt anchor one end of it on 
this world and God will anchor the other end on 
the other side of the abyss and then thou shalt 
travel over it some day from star to star — nor 
need a small eternity in which to do it. 



IX. 

Other Solar Families— II 



SIZE. 
UNITIES. 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 127 

IX. 

OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES-1I. 

SIZE — UNITIES. 

How do other Solar Families compare with our 
own as to size and importance ? Our own is no 
dwarf. Our own is not wanting in grandeur. 
Eight great worlds accompanied by twenty moons, 
hundreds of asteroids, and millions of comets 
wheel mightily through a home and astrodrome 
whose breadth is more than 5,400 millions of miles. 
Is this a fair specimen of the Solar Families ? Are 
some of them far grander than this ? 

If we could only bring actual vision to bear on 
the planets and other dependent bodies belonging 
to some of those far-off celestial households! But 
this no astronomer has yet done, or is in immedi- 
ate danger of doing. It is a "far cry" even to 
Alpha Centauri. And yet it is by no means incredi- 
ble that another generation of astronomers may do 
the feat that is now impossible to us. 

For the present — at least until we "shuffle off 
the mortal coil " that now prevents us from un- 



128 THE STARS OF GOD. 

folding our wings, having the freedom of the 
stellar spaces, and personally visiting the remoter 
heavens — we must try to find some reasonable 
substitute for sight. Is there any such substitute ? 
Have we any means of knowing how large and 
grand any of the distant Solar Families are ? 

Some weight should be given to the current im- 
pression among astronomers. This is that many 
of the remote planetary systems represented to us 
by the fixed stars are far grander than our own 
system; and that these grander systems belong to 
stars which are far grander than our sun. Differ- 
ent people might give different reasons for this 
impression. Some, perhaps, would give no reason 
at all — saying that with them it is a matter of feel- 
ing rather than of argument. Do I laugh at 
them ? Do I call them unscientific ? By no means. 
For a feeling is itself often of the nature of argu- 
ment — being the forecast shadows of many argu- 
ments on the way; being the impression made on 
us by truths not yet individualized but as it were 
held in solution in the air. We breathe the air; 
we unconsciously absorb its logical contents; we 
find ourselves disposed to believe things for which 
as yet we can give no satisfactory reason. So, 
apart from reasons, we should allow a certain 
weight to impressions that have become current 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 129 

in the astronomical world — to the impression that 
in the distant heavens there are grander Solar 
Families than our own. 

But cannot the reasons for this impression that 
lie latent in the astronomical air be brought out of 
hiding-; or, as the chemists say, precipitated ? Let 
us see. Suppose we have found a star larger than 
our sun. What reason have we for thinking that 
this star has a larger retinue of worlds than our 
sun has ? 

In the first place, it would accord with the 
analogy of our own satellite systems — in which, in 
general, the larger planets have the larger moon 
systems. Little Mercury has no moon at all; but 
the great frontier planets are the centres of great 
systems — especially those greatest planets of all, 
Jupiter and Saturn. What a glorious octave belts 
Saturn and makes music to our eyes if not to our 
ears! And yet still larger Jupiter has a still 
larger and more brilliant family if estimated by 
its total of sizes and weights. In these respects 
its five moons are more than equal to the eight 
moons of Saturn. Is it an unheard of thing for 
five men, or five principles, or five luminaries to 
outweigh and outshine double the number ? 

In the second place, it is one of the conditions 
of stability in our Solar Systems, as La Place has 
9 



130 THE STARS OF GOD. 

shown, that the mass of its sun be very large in 
comparison with the total of all the other masses 
in the system. As a matter of fact it contains 
about eight hundred times as much matter as all 
the planets put together. This seems to mean 
that a solar system may safely be made large in 
proportion to the largeness of the central orb; and 
that so there would be a waste of construction and 
power in a system whose size is not proportioned 
to the size of the central body. But such waste is 
contrary to the observed habit of Nature. She is 
a great economist. Like the Master who made 
her, she "gathers up the fragments that nothing- 
be lost." 

But the main consideration remains to be stated. 
It is that, so far as we can see, the main purpose 
of a sun is to furnish light and heat and govern- 
ment to surrounding worlds. Hence the larger 
the stores of these things provided by its Maker 
in any system the larger that system may be 
presumed to be. Otherwise there would be waste. 
God would not provide a furnace out of proportion 
to the work to be done — what wise person would! 

When we find the commissariat of a wise gen- 
eral to be large we conclude that his army is 
large. When we find that the coinage of a well- 
governed country is immense we infer that an 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 131 

immense business calls for it. When " a hun- 
dred lights are glancing in yonder mansion fair," 
and we find the tables laid with hundreds of 
covers we think we may safely infer that a great 
gathering is expected. So if we should find 
among the fixed stars a sun that equals a hun- 
dred such suns as ours in lighting, heating, and 
governing power we think we can safely infer a 
correspondingly great sphere of influence. The 
greater admiral should have in charge the greater 
celestial fleet. The wider celestial empire befits 
the greater monarch. 

It seems, then, that we may learn how a distant 
Solar Family compares with our own in size and 
importance whenever we can learn how its sun 
compares with ours in brightness. This can be 
done in some twenty cases — the cases of stars 
whose distances from us have been found. The 
distance of a star being known, w r e ask ourselves 
how much less light and heat would our sun give 
us if removed from us as far as the star is. This 
question is easily answered by the law that the 
intensity of a radiant force at any point varies 
inversely as the square of the distance of the 
radiant body from that point. That is, if our sun 
were carried away to twice its present distance, 
its light and heat to us would be only a quarter of 



132 THE STARS OF GOD. 

what it now is. If removed 200,000 times its 
present distance it would mean 40,000 millions 
times less to us as a luminary than it does now. 
But we have delicate instruments called photo- 
meters which can compare the light of our sun 
with that of a star; and we find that Alpha Centauri 
is about twice as brilliant as our sun would be at 
the same distance; Sirias 63 times more brilliant ; 
Polaris 86 times; Capella 430 times; Arcturus 516 
times; Alcyone 12,000 times. That is, Alcyone is 
equivalent as a luminary to 12,000 such suns as 
ours. 

This is not exactly the same thing as saying 
that Alcyone is 12,000 times larger than our sun: 
for it is conceivable that suns of the same size 
may differ in the intensity of their light and heat, 
as well as in their quantity of matter. But prob- 
ably in an average of stars the size will be in 
proportion to the amount of light emitted. 

So we see that some of the Solar Families are 
vastly grander than that to which we belong. 
Our own celestial household is no trifle — as we 
would be apt to realize if compelled to put a 
girdle about some of its members, or to stretch a 
surveyor's chain, unit by unit, along the orbits 
through which they move. But how much grander 
must be a household whose chief is 12,000 suns 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 133 

strong! That must be one of the very sublimest 
of physical things — whether we consider the num- 
ber of its orbs, or their size, or the immensity of 
the spaces which they dominate. And yet none 
can venture to say that even this sublimest Solar 
System we have up to the present happened to 
discover is the sublimest that exists. Among the 
millions of stellar families yet to be explored by 
us, living or dead, doubtless there are some far 
more colossal and grand than that which hides 
behind the glories of the o'reat Pleiad. 

But even now Merope hangs her head and 
drops her veil. When we look at our Solar Sys- 
tem quite by itself, and measure it by standards 
current on the earth, it seems a mighty object; 
and we find ourselves disposed to receive con- 
gratulations on the size of the house we live in, of 
the farm we cultivate, of the country to which we 
belong. But a larger knowledge punctures our 
pride. As soon as our balloon soars high enough 
to get a full view of some of our neighbors it is 
completely riddled by their greater glories. It 
collapses. What went up as a rocket comes down 
like the stick. Poor, outshone sister Merope is 
weeping behind her veil. 

But humility is useful though tearful. 



i34 THE STARS OF GOD. 

Those distant Solar Families, more than a hun- 
dred millions in number, removed from us by 
such wonderful abysses, and, many of them, far 
grander than our own — what further do we know 
about them? Very little; if we insist on using 
the word knowledge in its strictest sense. Very 
much; if we are not unreasonable and will accept 
such evidence as governs us in our most important 
daily affairs. 

i. They are all material. 

The abyss between them and us is one of space 
and not of nature. They are made up of the same 
general sort of substance that we see under our 
feet and closely around us. It is not an easy idea 
for some — but they might have been substance 
without being matter. But they are not. The 
spectra of the stars show that they are all incan- 
descent matter; and if the purpose of a star is to 
light and warm attendant worlds, these worlds 
themselves must be material; for only matter can 
be warmed and lighted by matter. 

2. The distant Solar Families are not only 
material, but are, to some extent at least, com- 
posed of the same sorts of matter we find in our 
own world. 

The matter directly about us is of many very 
different sorts — as hvdiwen, nitrogen, iron, and 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 135 

so on. Now it is conceivable that these earthly 
sorts of matter are only a small part of the varieties 
that actually exist. In the vast round of wealthy 
Nature there may be materials differing as widely 
from all such elements known to us as iron does 
from hydrogen; and the distant Solar Families 
might have been made up exclusively of such 
strange elements. But, as a matter of fact, they 
are not. Might have been is a very poor guide as to 
what actually is. Our spectroscopes tell us that 
hydrogen, sodium, magnesium, and iron are pres- 
ent in almost all the stars; and that no star whose 
spectrum has been examined has failed to show 
the presence of one or more familiar earthy sub- 
stances. 

This establishes the close kinship of the stars 
with our earth. But how do we know that the 
invisible planets that wait on any given star par- 
take of this kinship? We cannot answer; with the 
evolutionist that planets are the children of stars 
and would naturally be like their parents— -that 
planets were centrifugally drawn out of stars and 
therefore must be, to some extent, composed of 
the same elements. We can only say that it is 
very unlikely that earthly sorts of matter should 
exist in all the visible celestial worlds in all parts 
of the heavens and not exist in the invisible 



136 THE STARS OF GOD. 

worlds in close connection 'with these — especially 
in view of the fact already noticed that our sun 
and the earth have some elements in common. 
Would it not be uncommonly rough on both anal- 
ogy and induction to think otherwise ? Have we 
not a right to presume that the almost measure- 
less abyss that parts us from the distant Solar 
Families is yet spanned by a bridge of cosmical 
consanguinity. The heavens and the earth are 
blood relations, though their lots are cast so far 
apart. 

3. The distant Solar Families are largely sub- 
ject to the same forces and laws and phenomena 
that are found in our own system. 

The stars, like our sun, are worlds intensely on 
fire. They pour forth in every direction, among 
the planets that surround them, floods of light 
and heat. This light and heat in which the plan- 
ets are bathed and through which they are con- 
stantly swimming, are everywhere demonstrably 
the same — obeying the same laws of radiation, 
refraction, reflection, and diffusion which are 
noticed in the earth. So far as these great ele- 
ments are concerned, the elements which affect us 
so powerfully in a thousand different ways, the 
situation of all the stellar systems is precisely the 
same. 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 137 

So much for their environment. Now consider 
again the similarity of materials composing all 
these stellar systems. All of them matter. All 
of them matter of the same sorts as our own — at 
least to some extent, and perhaps wholly. Are 
we not bound to think, in the absence of all evi- 
dence to the contrary, that this general sameness 
of constitution carries with it the same forces and 
laws? Will not the same substance behave in 
very much the same way wherever located, espec- 
ially under the same harness of environment ? 
Mutant cesium, sed non animum. 

For example. Gravity, and a particular law of 
gravity, belong to every sort of matter found in 
our Solar Family. Whether it is oxygen, or 
carbon, or a metal, or some as yet unrecognized 
element, makes no difference ; it attracts other 
matter in every direction, and attracts with a 
force proportioned directly to its quantity of 
matter and inversely to the square of the distance 
between itself and the attracted body. This be- 
havior is found by ample astronomical experience 
to be altogether independent, within our own broad 
system, of the sort of matter and of locality. Nep- 
tune swims through his frontier orbit in obedience 
to precisely the same principle and law that gov- 
ern Mercury. Remove Neptune to the distance of 



13S THE STARS OF GOD. 

Sirius or Polaris and it would, doubtless, behave 
in the same way. Matter does not leave its own 
nature behind when it sets off on its travels — as 
some Christians are maliciously said to do — but 
carries away with itself every natural attribute, 
whether the travel be to the other side of the 
world or to the other side of creation. 

We therefore conclude that the matter, of what- 
ever sorts it may be, which makes up the distant 
Solar Families, attracts in every direction, and 
according to the law that rules everywhere in our 
system. What follows ? It follows that their 
planets are globes ; for the globular shape is the 
goal which all other shapes would sooner or later 
reach under the influence of gravity — not only 
where the mass is vaporous or fused, but even when 
in a rigid state. It also follows, as Newton has 
shown mathematically, that these globes in any 
system that does not at d once perish, must revolve 
about their primaries in obedience to what are 
known as Kepler's Laws : that is, must revolve in 
circles or ellipses, must revolve so as to make 
lines joining them to their primaries describe equal 
areas in equal times, must revolve so that the 
squares of their periodic times shall be as the 
cubes of their mean distances from their primaries. 
Whenever, therefore, we look away to the more 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 139 

than one hundred millions of fixed stars that 
shine about the very threshold of creation we 
are to conceive of them as so many centres of 
revolution to huge globes that go and come in 
swift, silent, harmonious, and calculable move- 
ments that are quite like those we admire in our 
own system. Each star is the centre of a vast 
hippodrome where worlds are the mettlesome 
steeds. These orbed coursers run their mighty 
rounds with almost incredible swiftness and yet 
never weary, never stumble, never swerve, never 
collide. And why ? A harness that never gives 
way is on every one of them. A yoke that never 
breaks presses every thunder-clad neck. And 
both harness and yoke are everywhere of the 
same pattern — the pattern of our terrestrial grav- 
ity that makes the apple fall and holds Neptune 
to his sphere. And the charioteer is — not Phaeton. 
The Father drives his own chariot. And this is 
why the heavens are not ablaze to-day. 



X. 
Other Solar Families— III. 

OTHER UNITIES. 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 143 

X. 

OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES-I1I. 

OTHER UNITIES. 

In stating what we know of the far-away Solar 
Families that gather about the fixed stars, I have 
said that they are material systems; that they are 
systems, to some extent at least, composed of the 
same sorts of matter found in our world; that 
they are systems largely subject to the same 
forces and laws and phenomena that appear in our 
own system. 

To these three points of likeness to our system 
let us now add a fourth: 

4. The distant Solar Families are in general 
stable systems. They continue unimpaired from age 
to age. 

Our own system with its complicate movements 
and inter-actions (sometimes called disturbances) 
has stood the wear and tear of uncounted millen- 
niums of historic and geologic time. For aught I 
know, and for aught anyone knows, it is in as 
sound a condition to-day as it ever was. More 



144 THE STARS OF GOD. 

than this — as we have seen, it has been mathemat- 
ically established that this system which has 
actually defied the ages so long contains in itself 
no element of instability; but, unless acted upon 
destructively from without, will continue as it is 
forever. 

Have the distant Solar Families a like steadfast- 
ness ? The answer which the heavens send back 
to this question is clearly an affirmative. In general 
the stars which represent these remote systems 
shine on without material change from age to age. 
They stand fast forever. Like the sun and moon, 
they " endure throughout all generations." The 
ancient constellations look down upon us still. The 
ship Argo is still plowing the celestial deeps, 
Cassiopeia is still sitting on her throne, Hercules 
is still holding aloft his giant club, and not one 
sparkling jewel has disappeared from the belted 
and sworded form of great Orion. Rainy Hyades, 
sweet Pleiades, Mazzaroth in his season, Arcturus 
and his sons, are all shining on us as they shone 
on Kepler, on Hipparchus, on Job, and doubtless 
on Adam. The Berlin star-maps that give us so 
faithfully the aspects of the heavens to-day are, 
no doubt, a faithful picture in general of the heav- 
ens as they appeared 5,000 years ago, or of the 
heavens as they will appear 5,000 years hence. 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 145 

There are certain noticeable changes among the 
stars, as we must soon see ; but, with a few seem- 
ing exceptions, they are such as need imply no 
catastrophe to the systems where they occur. 

This permanence in the stars means permanence 
in the systems of which they are the centres. 
Primary and satellites are fast bound up together. 
They are the hub, spokes, and rim of one wheel 
around which passes a strong and closely fittting 
tire of steel. The interlacings of natural law are 
such that when one member suffers all the mem- 
bers suffer with it. Ruptures, dislocations, derange- 
ments of all sorts, even in the extremities of the 
body, report themselves at once to the heart for 
sympathy. The breaking up of a family does not 
leave its head unharmed: A ruined kingdom is a 
king in ruins. So a ruined stellar system would 
at once proclaim itself in its sun. Orbits broken 
up, planet colliding with planet or impinging 
on its sun, would cause great conflagrations and 
make that sun to blaze out into vast and unwonted 
brightness — a phenomenon never known in the 
case of the great majority of stars. 

The great majority of the distant Solar Families 
are, therefore, like our own in the matter of sta- 
bility. Our own system, though its members are 
always wrestling with one another; always rush- 
10 



146 THE STARS OF GOD. 

ing hither and thither in steeple-chase fashion and 
apparently at random; always straining to fly off 
in a tangent from the head of the f amity; yet 
somehow manage never to come to grief, and are 
found under mighty domestic bonds never to come 
to. it in any of their endless circumnavigations. 
Similarly stable appear most of those remoter 
Solar Families represented to us by the Solar 
stars. They have immense faculty for lasting. 
They have no faculty at all for committing suicide. 
So they endure indefinitely. And it is a pleasant 
thing to some of us, amid the frailties and decays 
and vanishings of so many things about us, not 
excepting our human households and our bodily 
selves, to look away to the eternal stars and see 
mirrored in their unfading eyes, not only celestial 
households that are never broken up but also the 
unchangeableness of Him who is from everlasting 
to everlasting. 

But here we are obliged to say that, although 
in general stable systems, 

5. The distant Solar Families are sometimes 
the scene of vast disturbances and changes — in 
this respect, too, like our own system. 

The mighty forces pent up in the bosom of the 
earth have often, within historic time, broken 
loose in great convulsions. Before man appeared, 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 147 

still greater cataclysms took place and left their 
records in disrupted strata, upheaved mountains, 
buried forests, and extinguished animal races. 
Some go so far as to say that the earth was once 
wholly vaporous, or at least molten — inferring it 
partly from the shape of the earth, which is that 
which a fluid would take if revolving as at present 
under the action of gravity. But, inasmuch as 
this shape is also that which even a rigid cube 
would finally take under the same circumstances 
in the course of unlimited time, this inference is 
hardly warranted. There is, however, no uncer- 
tainty about the fact that the time will come 
when the "elements will melt with fervent heat 
and the earth and the works that are therein shall 
be burned up." 

This great event, unless some shielding miracle 
is interposed, will be great to our neighbors as 
well as greatly disastrous to ourselves. When a 
house is wrapped in flames how shall near neigh- 
bors escape a scorching ? But even now we see in 
our neighbor-planets, and especially in the tre- 
mendously scarred and shattered surface of the 
moon, signs of terrible upheaval and convulsions 
— such as give life-color to the theory that anciently 
a large planet, swinging between Mars and Jupiter, 
burst into hundreds of fragments that now appear 
as the asteroids. 



148 THE STARS OF GOD. 

" When in heaven the stars about the glittering 
moon beam loveliest in the breathless air, and in 
clear outline appear every hill, sharp peak, and 
woody dell; deep upon deep the sky breaks open 
and each star shines forth while joy fills the shep- 
herd's heart." When, on some fair night like this 
which Homer sang, we look around on the earth 
so quietly sleeping under her spangled curtains — 
look up on moon and planets looking down on the 
slumberer so softly and peacefully, it seems as if 
it had never been, and never could be, otherwise — 
all things steeped in eternal calm! Nevertheless 
this peaceful system of ours has seen rough times. 
It has come to its crown in the usual way — through 
crosses. It has not navigated the celestial deeps 
these thousands of years without encountering 
some foul weather, and getting some heavy 
strains. It must have been extremely well put 
together or it would have been a wreck long ago. 
If it could tell in fitting human speech all it has 
gone through it would beat all the romancers, and, 
perhaps, all the necromancers. 

Over against this set the following instances of 
stars suddenly appearing where none had ever 
been noticed; sometimes brighter than stars of the 
first magnitude; remaining thus for a short time, 
and then gradually fading away. The first in- 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 149 

stance on record was observed by Hipparchus, 
134 B. C. In 380 A. D. a star blazed forth near 
Alpha AquilcB which shone for three weeks as splen- 
didly as Venus, then disappeared, and has never 
since been seen. In 1572 a new star suddenly 
appeared in Cassiopea: when first noticed it was as 
bright as Sirius, and finally could be seen at mid- 
day: in about a month it began to fade, and in six- 
teen months had entirely disappeared. Other like 
cases occurred in 1604, 1848, and 1866. 

Now we cannot suppose that these are cases 
of stars newly created and almost immediately 
extinguished ; nor cases of old stars suddenly 
transferred astounding distances toward us, and 
then almost as suddenly taken back on our visual 
line to their old sites — as if a mistake had been 
made and mended. God does not take back his 
work in this way. Nor is it credible that the facts 
can be due to the sudden removal and as sudden 
return of some very great interposing opaque 
body that never removes again. The only satis- » 
factory explanation seems to be that certain old 
stars suddenly received a vast increase of light, 
either from temporary conflagration of some 
planets in their neighborhood, or from the falling 
into themselves of some planet, or great meteoric 
swarms like that through which we plow our 



150 THE STARS OF GOD. 

luminous way in November. In either case a 
mighty disturbance is involved. A planet break- 
ing into universal flame is a catastrophe. A sun 
absorbing into itself material for a hundredfold 
light and heat would act tremendously on its 
whole retinue of worlds, and especially on its near 
neighbors. What would be the effect in our 
system if, from any cause, our sun should suddenly 
take on a hundredfold brightness ? A miracle 
would be needed for the preservation of at least 
every near planet. Alas, for Mercury — unless 
something broader and diviner than the aegis of im- 
mortal Jove could be interposed. Well, perhaps 
that diviner shield was interposed in the cases men- 
tioned, as we hope will be done for Venus and 
Mars (to say nothing of the Moon) in the day 
when the earth for a short time will become a sun. 
Even strictly logical inferences are a poor sub- 
stitute for sight and the other senses. Not poor 
as a basis for information ; for nine-tenths of our 
science and practical wisdom stands on nothing 
better ; but poor as a means of conviction and 
vivid impression. The reader of the account I am 
now giving - of the Solar Families in the distant 
heavens may only imperfectly grasp the argu- 
ment ; or, grasping it, soon find the conclusions 
growing dim in the memory. But if he could do 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES 151 

what a certain French astronomer has lately pre- 
tended to do — could actually get rid of gravity 
and certain other corporeal drawbacks, and take 
to himself levity and certain other supernatural 
aids, and go voyaging among those remote sys- 
tems, and examine on the spot their various fea- 
tures with all his five senses, doubtless the result 
would be far more satisfactory. The facts would 
be vastly more vivid as well as more abundant ; 
and would never fade from his thought so lono- as 
thought itself should remain. And how long is 
that? 

But, alas, for the present we are helplessly tied 
down to earth. We must content ourselves with- 
out flying and having the freedom of all the 
spaces. The best we can do is to use our senses 
as far as they will go and then supplement by 
inductions and deductions and analogies and, at a 
pinch, by the "scientific imagination " of our time, 
stiffened somewhat by Locke and Bacon, to say 
nothing of Aristotle. Trying to do this, we have 
in former chapters reached certain conclusions as 
to those remote stellar families for which the 
fixed stars stand — viz., they are made of that par- 
ticular substance which we call matter ; they are, 
to some extent at least, composed of the same 
sorts of matter we find on the earth ; they largely 



152 THE STARS OF GOB. 

present the same forces, laws, and phenomena 
that appear in our own system : they are in 
general stable systems, though they have been 
in some cases the theatres of vast disturbance 
and change. To these five points of likeness to 
our own system, let us now add another. 

6. The distant Solar Families are all in course 
of translator}' motion — as is our own system. 

Our entire system is not only in motion about 
its own centre of gravity, but this centre is itself 
ever being transferred to distant regions. By no 
possibility can any celestial body always remain 
in the same district of space. The great law of 
universal attraction forbids. Were our sun once 
brought to absolute rest and then left to itself it 
would at once begin to move again under the 
stress of an attracting universe — unless it chanced 
to be already at that point in the universe where 
all its attractions are in equilibrium. In modern 
times nobody supposes that our earth, or even our 
sun, is the center of the creation. 

In fact we find that our sun, besides moving 
about the common centre of gravity of its system, 
is moving away toward the distant heavens, car- 
rying with itself of course all the members of its 
family. Some human families disintegrate easily: 
the Solar Family disintegrates never. A few 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 153 

human families stick together under all circum- 
stances : the Solar Family does the same, and 
each member says to every other, c> Whither thou 
goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will 
lodge, and where thou diest I will die, and there 
will I be buried ; naught but death shall part thee 
and me." 

The stars in the constellation Hercules are 
observed to be separating more and more from 
year to year, while the stars in the opposite quarter 
are gradually drawing together. This is just 
what would happen if our sun with all its planet- 
dom were in motion toward Hercules. Besides, 
the spectra of the stars in this constellation show 
that they are all approaching us. By carefully 
noting the rate of this approach astronomers feel 
able to say that we are crossing the heavens at the 
rate of 150,000,000 miles a year. This motion for 
the present seems to be in a straight line ; indeed 
the line we have been moving on for nearly , a 
hundred years does not differ sensibly from a 
straight line. But we know that it must really be 
a curve. To prevent collisions and wreckage it is 
as necessary that suns and systems move in orbits 
about centres of gravity as that individual planets 
should do so. The reason that our motion seems 
rectilinear is the exceeding largeness of the orbit 



i54 THE STARS OF GOD. 

we are traversing. Ah, how wonderfullv lar^e 
that orbit must be whose arc of nearly fifteen 
billions of miles hardly deserts a tangent through 
its whole length! If our lives, year after year, 
were keeping as close to a certain straight line as is 
the path of the sun we should have considerably 
more reason to congratulate ourselves than we 
now have. 

Truly, our system as it rushes through space 
has a far away look in its eyes ! It means a 
mighty voyage. Maedler thought it meant put- 
ing a girdle about Alcyone. If so, it will take 
some millions of years to accomplish its purpose ; 
for Alcyone is some 300,000 Neptunian sun- 
distances from us. 

Xow the translator}' motion which we observe 
in our own system, and which we know must exist 
in all the distant Solar Families, has been actually 
noticed in a great many of them. Careful watch- 
ing shows that the " fixed " stars are by no means 
fixed, but are slowly creeping about in all direc- 
tions ; and, in the case of many stars, these 
motions have been measured. Their annual 
amounts are very small — practically zero as com- 
pared with those of the planets ; requiring for 
their detection exact instruments and careful 
watching, and not noticeablv changing to the 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 155 

naked eye the positions of the stars relative to 
one another from age to age. But "many a little 
makes a mickle " in the heavens as well as on the 
earth ; and, after thousands of years from now, 
the configuration of constellations will be found 
to have sensibly changed. Striking charts have 
been made, showing the difference between Ursa 
Major as it now is and as it will appear 36,000 
years hence— i. e., if all things go on for that great 
time as they are now doing. But who can vouch 
for that ? 

These minute motions of the stars, which, how- 
ever in long periods accumulate into great changes 
of place, are due partly to our own motion 
through space, and partly to the motion of the 
stars themselves. Knowing the amount and 
direction of our own motion, we can subtract its 
effect from the total apparent motion of any given 
star. We find a remainder and are able to meas- 
ure it. This is called the star's proper motion. 
Whether this motion is toward us or away from 
us can be determined by the spectroscope — as can 
also the amount of the approach or recession. 

All these proper motions, like the translatory 
motion of our sun, are apparently rectilinear. But 
they must really be in orbits. They appear other- 
wise because the orbits are so vast that the curves 



156 THE STARS OF GOD. 

described within our observation do not differ 
sensibly from straight lines. Our sun, with his 
body-guard of planets about him, is going a great 
round at a great pace ; but he has for companions 
in this at least a ■ hundred millions of other fami- 
lies. It is a trackless void through which they 
are moving ; but not one of them is journeying 
blindly or uncertainly. He 'knows just where he 
is going and just how much time he has to spend 
in his journey ; and he will go as surely, and as 
certainly come round on time, as if underlaid by 
steel tramways. 

We say "come round." But we can say more 
than this demonstrable thing. It is that other 
equally demonstrable thing that all the other 
Solar Families are rounding about the same centre 
of gravity that governs and pivots us. Among 
the more than one hundred millions of such fami- 
lies belonging to our cosmical archipelago there 
must be many different secondary centres of 
revolution ; but this we are sure of that there 
must be one final centre about which all the 
revolutions are curved. If it is not in the Pleiades, 
as Maedler inferred from certain star driftings, 
it is somewhere within our cosmical district. Can 
we do better than shake hands with our illustri- 
ous astronomer who has done so much for stellar 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 157 

science, and be thankful that he has felt able to 
suggest to us such a magnificent metropolis for 
such magnificent navies to make such magnificent 
circumnavigations about ? 

Wherever this common centre may be, we must 
remember that, from the necessity of the case, 
unless it is the gravity-centre of the whole mate- 
rial universe, it must be itself in motion. Hence 
the majestic rounds of which I have written, can- 
not be curves returning into themselves, as circles 
or ellipses, but rather abortive attempts at such 
curves, resulting in endless spirals that are always 
seeking new regions in which to uncoil themselves. 
So none of the countless Solar Families ever 
revisits a spot where it has once been. 

Always moving day with it ? Yes. Always on 
the road, bag and baggage ? Yes, and more. For 
it is not only always emigrating, but it is always 
emigrating to a wholly new and unknown country. 
And it will never be otherwise. However far the 
Solar Families may travel they will never find 
spots exactly to their mind, where they can settle 
down, set up their household gods, and say, This 
is home. Well, this looks a little unpleasant to 
some of us who dislike the nomadic sort of life ; 
but there are some people who are born travelers, 
and who are never so much at home as when 



158 THE STARS OF GOD. 

away from home. To such people, including all 
the Solar Families, the words of the prophets will 
not be as pathetic as they are to me : " Weep 
sore for him that goeth away ; for he shall return 
no more, nor see his native country." 



XI. 

Other Solar Families IV 

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS. 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 161 



XL 

OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES-IV. 

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS. 

There are very many unanswered questions in 
all the sciences. Of course questions are always 
in order; it is necessary to ask them, and neces- 
sary to try to give satisfactory answers; otherwise 
there can be no progress. But it is one thing to 
try to answer a question and quite another thing" 
to really answer it. Attempted explanations do 
not always explain — not even when made by sci- 
entific men. Even astronomers sometimes con- 
fessedly fail. vSee some examples in connection 
with the distant Solar Families which we have 
been considering. 

i. What is the explanation of what are called 
variable stars ? 

Very many stars shine with a variable lustre. 
In not a few cases the change is extremely irregu- 
lar — following no conceivable law. In other cases 
the change is periodical — the stars gradually fad- 
ing from a maximum to a certain point and then 
1 1 



i6 2 THE STARS OF GOD. 

gradually returning to their original lustre, which 
they retain for a while and then begin to repeat 
the process. The periods are of all sizes from a 
few hours to a few centuries. Among the short 
periods the most remarkable, perhaps, is that of 
Algol which generally appears as a star of the 
second magnitude and continues thus for 61 hours; 
it then fades and in less than 4 hours becomes of 
the fourth magnitude, and thus remains about 
twenty minutes; it then increases and in 4 hours 
regains its greatest lustre. The whole circle of 
change is complete in less than three days. 

To what are these changes of aspect owing? 

Of course a change in the apparent lustre of a 
star would be made by a change in its distance 
from us; also by a special accumulation of sun- 
spots on one side of it if rotating; — also by the 
passing of opaque bodies, luminous or non-lumi- 
nous, between us and the star. Some cases of 
variation can be explained tolerably well by one 
or more of these suggestions; others can hardly 
be covered by all of them when patched together 
into a coat of many colors; and there are others 
still whose nakedness cannot be half covered by 
such a patch-work garment however deftly put 
together. So astronomers are wont to confess. 
Says Lockyer, "The cause of the change of bright- 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 163 

ness in variable stars is one of the most puzzling- 
questions in the whole domain of Astronomy." 

2. Unanswered questions as to the various 
colors of the stars and consequently of the Solar 
Families belonging to them. 

Close examination, especially in tropical regions, 
shows laro-e differences as to color amon? the stars. 
In fact all the colors of the rainbow are found 
among them. Most of them, like our sun are 
white: but Aldebaran, Antares, and Betelguese 
are red; Capella, Rigel, and Procyon are blue: 
Sirius, Vega, and Altair are green; Arcturus is 
yellow. One group of a hundred stars resembles 
a bouquet of fancy jewelry, where the ruby, and 
emerald and amethyst and pearl and sapphire and 
diamond blend their glories. 

These different colors must be due to the stars 
themselves, and the effect must be to give to the 
surrounding planets as many differently colored 
days. How a red day, or a green, or a blue must 
affect the appearance of a planet we can judge 
from the hues sometimes cast over our landscapes 
at sunset and sunrise and at other times when the 
air is heavy with vapors, or from the rich colors 
that bathe the interior of some sanctuary as the 
light streams in through its painted windows. 



1 64 THE STARS OF GOD. 

If we ask whether these variously colored days 
that flood the distant Solar Families do not natu- 
rally suggest the many sidedness of the Divine 
power and skill, and also suggest properly that 
He who loves variety in the hues of earthly gems 
and flowers also loves such variety among those 
celestial gems and flowers that we call the stars, 
some of us will not puzzle long for an answer. 
But what if we ask such questions as the follow- 
ing? Do days of different colors mean different 
chemical and physiological, as well as pictorial, 
effects on animal and vegetable life, and if so 
what? Do they mean different stages of con- 
flagration in the stars, different ages for the stars 
and for their surrounding worlds ? Do they mean 
different constituent elements in the stars, or at 
least in their gaseous envelopes ? In the case of a 
blue star, does the blueness mean that there are 
none but blue rays in the light of the star, or that 
all but the blue rays have been sifted out by 
encompassing gases ? Such questions have never 
been satisfactorily answered. We put them on 
rile for the use of — perhaps another generation. 
The prospect of our solving them is bluer than 
any star. 

But it seems that the color of a star, though 
generally steadfast, does sometimes change in the 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 165 

course of long periods. Sirius, now green, was 
once described as fiery red, then as white. Capella, 
now pale blue, was once red and afterwards yel- 
low. In general these changes are very slow; 
but they have been known to be very rapid — as in 
the case of a star observed by Tycho Brake in 1572, 
which changed from white to red and then to 
yellow and then back again to white, all in 16 
months. What is the cause of these changes ? 
Astronomers have to confess ignorance. About 
all they can say is that such changes imply ''inces- 
sant movement and transformation going on in 
the remote heavens;" but as to what and how 
great these movements and transformations are, 
we still need light. Hypotheses, of course, are 
not wanting: but on none of them have we been 
able to sail far on our Congo toward the dark 
interior before being compelled by cataracts to 
disembark. 

3. Any recent creations among the distant 
Solar Families ? 

That there was a time when not one of these 
systems existed is plain from the Scriptures. But 
it is conceivable that, since that time, there has 
been a succession of world-creations — star after 
star springing into being at intervals at as many 
successive fiats of the Almighty. This successive- 



1 66 THE STARS OF GOD. 

ness is not only conceivable, but even seems more 
likely to be actual, than that God should have 
brought the whole visible cosmos into being at one 
stroke of his will and then forever ceased creating. 

If star-creations have been successive, the ques- 
tion naturally arises, Have any such creations 
taken place in our time, or in the time of our 
astronomy ? Stars have appeared where none had 
been noticed before, "they have appeared suddenly, 
and, perhaps in a few cases, they have remained 
undimmed permanently. Now these stars may be 
new creations: but they also may be old stars 
situated just beyond the frontier of vision which, 
suddenly receiving a vast access of fuel, flash up 
into visibility and so continue for hundreds of 
years. So we cannot decide. Our science as yet 
can neither affirm nor deny the creation of suns 
and systems within the historic time. 

4. Any recent annihilations among the distant 
Solar Families ? 

It is commonly said that matter is never annihi- 
lated — it only changes its form and relations. It 
is true that no agency of man, and no natural 
process, either does or can make a single particle 
of matter cease to be. But what man and Nature 
cannot do God can. He can both make some- 
thino- out of nothing and reduce something to 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. 167 

nothing again. He has clone the one thing" in 
"creating the heavens and the earth" — in giving 
existence to countless stellar systems in space once 
absolutely vacant of matter. He can do the other 
thing — can at any moment reduce to absolute 
vacancy any one of the great systems His will has 
brought into being. To-day Sirius with its pomp 
of attendant globes is shining and wheeling in 
almost infinite glory and dynamics: to-morrow, 
let the Eternal will it, that wonderful astrodrome 
shall be as empty of everything as it was before 
the morning stars sang together. This is what 
God can do. Has He ever done the like within 
the time of our astronomy ? 

It is certainly conceivable that occasion may 
have arisen for doing it. As fitting occasion has 
arisen for creating, so fitting occasion may have 
come for absolutely destroying a Solar Family. 
It has filled out its day, it has served its purpose, 
it has fulfilled its mission, and why should it be 
continued ? Perhaps it has become so saturated 
with effete and corrupt elements and associations 
that a clean riddance of the whole thing is the 
pleasantest possible thought to a perfect being. 
As we sometimes like to come as near as we can 
to destroying a worn-out garment that has become 
incurably ragged and unclean; as the authorities 
of a town sometimes replace the primitive school 



1 68 THE STARS OF GOB. 

house which has become unsuited to the educa- 
tional needs of the people by a larger and more 
commodious building; as a prosperous man re- 
places his original cabin with a finer dwelling to 
suit his better circumstances and larger needs: so 
God may do with a stellar system. We men can- 
not annihilate the old garment or buildings: the 
best thing we can do is to remove the materials to 
some out-of-the-way place, or turn them into flame 
and smoke and ashes: but, rather than be at the 
trouble of doing this, we would, if we could by 
merely willing it, annihilate the offensive materials 
just where they stand. It would be the simplest 
and most natural thing to do — for man or God. 

But theory apart, what is the answer of facts to 
the question. Do the stars ever absolutely perish ? 

Some stars have disappeared from their places, 
and up to the present time have not reappeared. 
Sir Wm. Herschel mentioned 13 of this sort, and 
others have been noticed since. 

Such are the facts. Do they show that some 
stars have gone into bankruptcy — ever paying o*ut 
more than they receive and so at last becoming 
exhausted and insolvent ? Of course the facts are 
perfectly consistent with the annihilation theory. 
But they are equally consistent with the idea that 
some of the lost stars were insensibly withdrawn 
from view bv their own relative motion: that 



OTHER SOLAR FAMILIES. t6 9 

others were variables of long' periods and will yet 
reappear; and that still others appear lost on 
account of the inaccurate observations and maps 
of all but recent times. If great Sirius, which has 
been known for ages as a non-variable, should sud- 
denly disappear while we are looking at it and not 
appear again for many centuries, it might well be 
considered a perished star. But no such case has 
ever been known. All the cases of lost stars on 
record are cases in which inaccurate observation 
may be suspected, or which the theory of variable 
stars can explain. 

It is not pleasant to confess ignorance. We 
would be glad to send an intelligent gaze into all 
depths and heights. "I do not know" is about 
the hardest confession that a young philosopher 
can make. So reluctant are some to make it that 
they are strongly tempted to christen questions and 
possibilities into science and proclaim them as 
such from the minarets of the world. This has 
often been done. But truths are not made by 
proclamation. Interrogation points cannot be pro- 
claimed into periods, nor the subjunctive mood 
into the indicative. The interests of true science 
have often suffered sadly from premature decisions. 
They all have to be taken back. And, meanwhile, 
centuries have dragged a ball and chain because 
of the ipse dixit s of some Aristotle or less. 



XII. 
Solar Communities— I 



KNOTS. 
HAMLETS. 
TOWNS. 
VILLAGES. 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 173 

XII. 

SOLAR COMMUNITIES-I. 

KNOTS HAMLETS — TOWNS VILLAGES. 

Sometimes a family is solitary. It is located be- 
tween towns — it is set down in the heart of a great 
western prairie. For miles and miles in every direc- 
tion no other family can be found. The smoke 
that curls upward from its cabin never gets high 
enough to descry anywhere an answering column. 

A few weeks pass. We take a second look at 
that lonely western family. Lo, it is no longer 
without neighbors. Two or three new cabins are 
within sight and easy reach of one another. We 
have a little neighborhood of families in close con- 
nection with one another but parted by great 
spaces from all similar neighborhoods. Another 
stage of settlement has been reached. Unity has 
become a small plurality. The hermit has become 
a hamlet. Smoke answers to smoke every morn- 
ing, candle answers to candle every night. The 
light that beams from the window of one home 
beams into the window of another. If one familv 



174 THE STARS OF GOD. 

gets into trouble there is another at hand to give 
sympathy and help. Not only the pioneer but the 
van-guard of settlement has arrived. Listen! Is 
not the tramp of thousands behind them ? 

The Solar Families which we have thus far 
been considering have been solitaires, or what 
seemed to be such at first view. Each has seemed 
a single islet in a vast ocean otherwise unoccupied. 
Our own Solar Family is one of these lonely ones. 
It has no neighbor nearer than about 20,000 billions 
of miles: and a great many other celestial house- 
holds are in the same hermit-like, secluded, quar- 
antined condition. It is to be hoped that they are 
neither lazarettos, nor prisoners condemned to 
solitary confinement. I think they are not. There 
are quite too many of them. Some good families 
on the earth flourish best when well by themselves 
— why may it not be so among yonder families in 
the heavens ? 

But first impressions are sometimes misleading. 
It may be that some of these Solar Families that 
seem so lonely are not as lonely as ,they seem. 
Near neighbors draw together as we recede from 
them and at last appear as one. Some stars that 
seem hermits may really be knots and hamlets of 
stars. So let us look at them again carefulh T 
through our telescopes. Lo, a star which we had 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 175 

thought a unit divides up into two or three stars. 
We try that famous celibate Polaris and find him 
double. We try glorious Castor and Sirius and 
find that neither of them cares for single blessed- 
ness. We even find that Gamma Andromeda is 
triple, Epsilon Lyra quadruple; and that Theta 
Orion is is seven-fold. About 10,000 complex stars 
that shine as one to the naked eye have been dis- 
covered since the time of Sir Wm. Herschel. 
Doubtless many more will be found. 

Now what do these facts mean ? Not necessarily 
that the members composing a double or multiple 
star are closely together in space; for stars any 
distance apart would seem near if seen in nearly 
the same direction. But we are able to determine 
when the nearness is merely optical. If the com- 
ponent stars are found to have the same proper 
motion in direction and degree they must be 
physically connected and belong to the same local 
neighborhood. This condition is fulfilled in the 
case of by far the greater part of the double and 
multiple stars. The members of each are moving 
along the sky in company. The point toward 
which one is tending is that toward which all are 
tending. They keep step together like trained 
soldiers. This could not be unless they were 
bound up together as parts of the same physical 



176 THE STARS OF GOD. 

system and were relatively near neighbors. But 
each of these neighbors must be regarded as the 
centre of a planetary system; and so each double 
or multiple star must mean a little neighborhood 
of as many Solar Families as there are components 
in the star. Thus in the case of the sextuple star 
Sigma Orionis we have six Solar Families forming 
a little commuity by themselves. 

In some cases the component stars are nearly or 
quite equal; but generally there is considerable 
difference in size. Rigel, a splendid star in the 
left foot of giant Orion, is made up of one very 
large star and one very small. The same is true 
of Sirius. And we naturally suppose that there is 
a corresponding inequality in the size and im- 
portance of the planetary systems thus set together 
— one consisting, it may be, of a thousand worlds 
and another of ten. The unequal families which 
are apt to make up our human neighborhoods are 
projections on a small scale of facts in the sky. 

By carefully watching the double and multiple 
stars, it has been found that in each of several 
hundreds of them there is not only a common 
proper motion of the component stars, but also 
that they are in course of REVOLUTION among 
themselves. One star revolves about another star; 
a pair of stars about another pair; a triplet about 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 177 

a triplet, and so on. How the eyes of Sir Wm. 
Herschel must have snapped when, on the night of 
Nov. 5, 1779, while comparing- the position of the 
small companion of Castor with that set dow r n 
twenty years before, he first caught the idea of 
this great fact — or rather, awoke to the fact that 
perhaps he had caught a sun in the act of revolv- 
ing about a sun, a system of worlds revolving- 
about a system — and how brightly his twin eyes 
must have shone on the shining twins above as he 
watched the slow unfolding of the orbit year by 
year till his peradventure was strengthened into a 
certainty and he could say in 1803, "Its period is 
about 342 years." There are few things that will 
so kindle the fires in a man's eye as the sense of 
having made a great discovery — perhaps because 
it will immortalize himself, and perhaps because it 
will benefit the world. It may be that the fire of 
both thoughts is in his heart and is flashing from 
his eyes. 

Since that time the motions among the double 
stars have drawn much enthusiastic observation. 
About 13 of them have completed one or more 
revolutions: 28 have made more than half a revo- 
lution; 43 more than a quarter-revolution; and 
156 have advanced more than twenty degrees on 
their orbits. Many others have traversed smaller 
12 



178 • THE STARS OF GOD. 

arcs, and yet arcs large enough to show the forms 
of the orbits, their inclinations to the line of sight, 
and their approximate periods. Most of these 
periods exceed a thousand years; but there are 22 
stars whose periods are less than a century, and 
among them one hurries through its orbit after a 
hurricane fashion in 14 years. 

Stars consisting of two members each, being the 
easiest to deal with, have naturally drawn the 
most attention from astronomers. But others have 
not been wholly neglected. The same process of 
revolution, though of a more complex pattern, has 
been noticted going on in multiple stars. Thus in 
the quadruple star Epsilon Lyra: whose stars appear 
in two pairs, it is found that the period of one 
pair is 1,000 years, of the other 2,000, and of both 
pairs about their common centre of gravity some- 
thing short of a million of years. Each star in 
this system solves the difficult problem of com- 
passing two shifting centres of attraction at the 
same time — a feat sometimes attempted by men, 
but rarely with success. 

Generally, the orbits in connection with the 
double and multiple stars are extremely elliptical. 
In two cases, those of Alpha Centauri and Gamma 
Virginis, the orbits are nearly five times longer 
than they are broad, and generally the length ex- 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 179 

ceeds the breadth by more than a quarter of itself. 
This is a hard nut for the friends of the nebular 
hypothesis to crack. Up to the present the only 
cracking heard has been that of the hammer. 

In the cases where the distance of a double or 
multiple star is known, we can easily find the dis- 
tance in miles between its members. And we find 
.that the distance between the two stars which 
compose 61 Cygni is considerably greater than that 
between Neptune and our Sun; though the inter- 
val between Sirius and its companion is less than 
that between Uranus and our Sun. And there are 
other double stars like Sirius in this respect. That 
is, there are systems of suns on a smaller scale 
than our system of planets. 

In cases, too, where the distance of a double star 
is known w r e can weigh the stars — can find by 
Kepler's Third Law how the mass of matter in 
the component stars compares with that of our 
sun. Thus we find that the weight of Sirius is 
nearly 14 times that of our sun. 

Of late we can do better than even this. For, by 
means of the spectroscope and photography, • we 
can sometimes detect a double star when its du- 
plicity is not visible in any telescope; also deter- 
mine the distance between its members, the period 
of one about the other, and the sum of their 



180 THE STARS OF GOD. 

masses in terms of our sun. This has been done, 
apparently, in the case of Mizar, the middle star 
in the tail of Ursa Major. This star has long been 
known as double, but it has lately been found by 
the spectroscope that the larger member is itself 
double, and that one of its members goes about 
the other in 104 days, and that the distance be- 
tween the two is about the distance of Mars from 
our sun, and that their combined quantity of mat- 
ter is nearly 40 times that of our sun. If now we 
could only measure the angular interval between 
these two components we could easily tell the dis- 
tance of Mizar from us. The same process will 
enable us to verify the distances of some other 
stars as given by their parallaxes. Science always 
likes to reach the same result by independent pro- 
cesses. Assurance becomes doubly sure — if one 
knows what that means. 

It is among the double and multiple stars that 
we find the most brilliant examples of colored 
suns. In Iota Cancri the larger member is orange, 
the smaller blue. In Eta Cassiopeia one member is 
white, the other a rich ruddy purple. In the triple 
star, Gavwia Andromedce, one member is orange- 
red, the other members are emerald green. 

Of course this means for the Solar Family 
oathered about each star in these little Solar 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 181 

neighborhoods not only the light of several suns, 
but of several suns of different sizes and colors. 
These may be in the sky at the same time. Some 
may be rising while others are setting. Differently 
colored days or moons will sometimes succeed one 
another, and sometimes they will combine in a day 
or night tinted like a rainbow. There is room for 
infinite speculation as to the changes that would 
be needed in human beings to adapt them to such 
strange surroundings. Beyond all question the 
rational beings who, beyond all question, inhabit 
those distant worlds are fitted to their circum- 
stances by Him who, beyond all question, made 
them. Men often make a misfit — God never. We 
may have reason to complain of our shoemaker or 
our tailor or our politician — some of the most 
grievous misfits of all lie at the door of the latter 
— perhaps he himself is a greater misfit than his 
work. But Omniscience never fails to adapt his 
creatures to their habitation — or rather their hab- 
itation to his creatures. As the Sabbath was made 
for man and not man for the Sabbath, so worlds 
were made for the sake of their inhabitants, and 
not inhabitants for the sake of the worlds — the 
palace for the king and not the king for the palace. 
Besides homes somewhat loosely distributed, a 
township usually contains some in special prox- 



1 82 THE STARS OF GOD. 

imity to one another — little neighborhoods so close 
that the homes composing them appear as one 
when viewed a little distance away. In some cases 
two or more families occupy the same dwelling. 
In all cases what one hears all are apt to hear; 
what one sees all are apt to see. The epidemic 
that attacks one may be expected to attack all; 
and when circumstances enhance the value of one 
homestead the others of course share in the ad- 
vance. A fire well started in one will endanger all 
of them — so near to one another are they. It is a 
knot of families. They are cheek by jowl. Very 
possibly they are consanguineous. The father or 
grandfather built homes for his children by the side 
of his own. He wanted them all within easy reach. 
He wanted to be able to run in and out at any 
moment. So he nestled the dear ones snugly 
together about himself. These answer to the 
snugly compacted double and multiple stars. 

But, besides some homes that are compacted into 
very close and small neighborhoods, a township 
often contains homes more sparsely distributed 
and which are separated from similar collections 
of homes in other towns by large spaces compara- 
tively vacant of population. This also answers to 
what we see in the sky. Besides nucleated stars, 
that is stars knotted together by the naked eye, 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 183 

we see others in looser systems. In each of these 
systems the stars always appear separate, but 
they are in many eases relatively neighbors to one 
another in space and so must be physically con- 
nected together. Let us call such systems Solar 
Townships. Sir Wm. Herschell calls them groups. 

A mere glance at the sky (and this, by the way, 
is all that most men give — greatly to their loss) 
shows us that the separate stars are not sown 
evenly through the vault, but that they often 
appear by twos and threes and still larger num- 
bers. Sometimes the stars are so many and the 
intervals between them so small that we seem to 
see a celestial village: at other times the stars are 
so few and the intervals so large that we seem to 
see a celestial country-side whose homes are far 
from being within hailing distance of one another. 

Doubtless some of these stellar neighborhoods 
are merely optical; the stars appear together, not 
because they are really neighbors in space, but 
because they happen to lie in nearly the same 
direction from us. But we have reason to believe 
that many of the groups are locally and physically 
connected. As men gather into families, families 
into hamlets, hamlets into towns, towns into states, 
states into empires, so the stars proceed in their 
First, the various satellites groups; 



i8 4 THE STARS OF GOD. 

next, our planetary system forming a larger group 
inclusive of- the others: next those close groups of 
suns represented by the double and multiple stars 
— all these minor groups lead us to expect still 
wider and more comprehensive groupings. So 
when we see a number of separate stars lying 
quite by themselves in the sky (many times more 
remote from other stars than they are from one 
another, like the Azores or Bahamas) — it is easy to 
believe that we have a continuation of past experi- 
ence and see a celestial community bound up into 
one by special neighborly ties, though occupying 
a larger district and generally including a larger 
membership than any we have yet seen. 

And here certain other circumstances come to 
our aid. We find that there is a certain family 
likeness among the stars of an apparent group — 
that their proper motions are the same, or have a 
certain suggestive reference to one another; that 
their spectra are alike and show that they are all 
approaching or receding from us at the same rate. 
Besides, has not the Calculus of Probabilities, con- 
firmed by observation, shown that the greater part 
of the double and multiple stars are so many 
physical systems; and on like grounds must not 
the same be true of most of the apparent stellar 
groups? These adjutants help us greatry. These 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 1S5 

many littles make a mickle; and so astronomers 
are agreed that by far the larger part of apparent 
stellar groups imply so many local neighborhoods 
in each of which the members revolve about its 
centre of gravity. 

The following' things are true of these group 
systems. They consist of all uumbers of stars, 
from two to hundreds. In each of three paws of 
Ursa Major is found a duad of stars, presumably a 
group — also five of its principal stars, many de- 
grees apart, have a common proper motion and 
also a common motion in the line of sight; show- 
ing that they are a local neighborhood and so 
make a system by themselves. In Cassiopeia we 
find two triplets in each of which the stars are so 
near to one another, relatively to other stars, that 
we must regard them as belonging to the same 
system. Orion shows us still larger clans among 
the celestial highlands. And so we may ascend to 
groups whose members count up to scores and 
hundreds, and cover whole degrees of the vault. 
Some of these groups have in them stars whose 
distances from us have been measured, so that we 
know how far from us the groups are. Others 
contain no such stars, and we can only say of 
them that their remoteness is still more enormous, 
and that the intervals between members, separated 



1 86 THE STARS OF GOD. 

sometimes by degrees instead of seconds, must also 
be enormous. The multiple stars give us knots of 
suns distributed somewhat on the scale of our 
planetary system : but in groups of stars the inter- 
vals are of quite another order of largeness. At 
most of the stars whose distances from us are 
known the entire orbit of Xeptune subtends less 
than an angle of 2 " : how far apart must be those 
still remoter stars whose intervals appear as several 
degrees! And yet we see that physically they 
belong together. Even when members of the 
same family are widely separated we can often 
see their relationship to one another without diffi- 
culty. Their family likeness betrays consanguin- 
ity though one is living in Boston, another in Xew 
York, and still another in Washington. " Is not 
your name X ? I thought so. How much you re- 
semble your two brothers!" 

The form of the larger groups is irregular — as 
irregular as would be a line joining at any mo- 
ment the outside planets of our own system. The 
stability of our own system shows that no particu- 
lar conformation of a group is essential to its 
stability. 

Among the larger groups are those known as 
the Pleiades, Hyades, and Praesepe. Of these the 
most famous is the Pleiades — appearing as six stars 



SOLAR COM MUX ITIES. 187 

to the ordinary eye, seven or eight or even twelve 
to an extraordinary one, hundreds to the eye of a 
small telescope, and, on a nebulous background, 
more than two thousand to the same instrument 
armed with the camera. It is estimated that the 
chances in favor of at least the leading stars being 
a physical system are as 500,000 to one : some say 
as 500,000,000 to one. No matter which estimate 
you take — they both mean the same thing, viz., 
the incredible and so the unscientific. 

The members of this group must therefore re- 
volve about their common centre of gravity; and 
that means a revolution about this centre of all 
the solar families belonging to the system. Each 
family swings about its sun, and then each sun with 
its cortege goes swinging about the common cen- 
tre. More than this. If we examine a good map 
of the group we find several sub-groups in it, each 
of which must have its own centre of revolution. 
Alcyone forms a sub-group with several other 
small stars, Pleione and Atlas another, Asterope 
and some small stars another, perhaps Maia, Tay- 
geta, and Celaeno another. This means for every 
Solar family contained in the group at least three 
different revolutions going on at the same time : 
so that if one of the planets could leave a perma- 
nent luminous trail behind it its course would 



1 88 THE STARS OF GOD. 

appear anything but an orbit. The complicate 
spiral would, however, appear considerably more 
symmetrical than that of the man who attempts to 
serve both God and Mammon at the same time, or 
to please all parties by the course he takes in 
social and political matters. 

This beautiful group, named time out of 
mind, and, time out of mind, famous in poem 
and song, is remarkable for containing the 
largest star yet known to us, viz., Alcyone. 
It must be equal to 12,000 such suns as ours 
to shine as it does at the distance from us of 
some 50 millions sun-distances. If brought within 
our system it would look our sun out of counte- 
nance in a moment. Our king of day would be 
scarcely more than a fire fly in the presence of 
that august monarch that blazes away in the neck 
of Taurus. He is worthy to be the central sun of 
the Milky Way — as the illustrious Maedler (him- 
self a multiple star) thought him, and as time may 
yet prove him to the satisfaction of the scientific 
Thomases. We say him, though we have said it. 
Alcyone is a most masculine world though free of 
the neuter gender and bearing a feminine name. 



X1I1. 
Solar Communities— II 



PROVINCES. 
CITIES. 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 191 

XIII. 

SOLAR COMMUNITIES-II. 

PROVINCES CITIES. 

Besides little knots or clumps of dwellings so 
closely set together that at a little distance they 
appear as one; besides the dwellings scattered at 
considerable intervals over a township and yet 
bound up together in one town system of govern- 
ment ; besides these, dwellings are sometimes 
largely accumulated in a city so that to an ob- 
server from without all individuality is lost, save 
toward the outskirts. From whatever point 
viewed, it is a maze of structures — heaps on 
heaps, by thousands and tens of thousands, with 
no possibility of distinguishing one home from 
another. And could the outside of every home be 
brilliantly illuminated in the night, as only plenti- 
ful electricity could do, we should see the city as 
a central blaze of light gradually thinning off 
toward the edges and there replaced by .separated 
gleams which separate more and more till all is 
unbroken darkness. 



192 THE STARS OF GOD. 

Lifting our eyes to the sky we discover there 
celestial cities — as well as celestial townships and 
hamlets. We find stars in great bunches — ap- 
parently so packed and wedged together that in 
parts no telescope can separate them. At once 
we see that giants are before us, immense aggre- 
gations of suns, huge centres of condensed popu- 
lation ; that each cluster must count its shining 
families by tens and perhaps hundreds of thou- 
sands, were it possible to count them. And each 
cluster is plainly a neighborhood by itself. All 
around it is comparative, if not absolute, vacancy. 
It is insulated. And the interval between it and 
other like shining islands is much greater than 
between groups. Its appearance is just what a 
city whose houses are all in a vivid glow would 
present in the blackest of nights. I say its appear- 
ance. Of course the closeness of the stars to one 
another is only apparent. They must be actually 
hundreds of millions of miles apart ; and they 
appear otherwise chiefly because, being disposed 
in solid forms, they are projected on one another. 

Some groups of stars can be recognized as such 
by the naked eye. But no cluster, no celestial 
city, appears as such save in a telescope. In a 
few cases a good eye may detect a small hazy spot 
which when viewed through a telescope turns out 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 195 

to be a nest or swarm of suns ; but generally such 
swarms do not even hint their existence save to 
our better instruments. The larger and better 
our instruments the more of these clusters do we 
find. Sir William Herschel made out a list of 
more than one hundred, and since his time many 
more have been noted. His son alone added 
more than fifty to the list. What a happy thing 
when a son succeeds to the successes and glory of 
his father! A hundred years have passed since 
the great father of observational astronomy disap- 
peared, but his soul is still marching on. Doubt- 
less the next hundred years (which none of us will 
live to see through) will harvest a great addition 
to our already splendid catalogue of celestial 
cities. Men go, but discoveries and men continue 
to come. City-annexes in our day are fashionable. 
Hitherto I have spoken only of those clusters 
which are partly resolved into separate stars by 
the telescope. Some of these were, at first and for 
a long time, supposed to be no clusters at all ; 
were declared to have an irresolvable aspect ; 
were confidently pronounced vast clouds of fiery 
gas and vapor. But, one by one, they have 
opened and spread out their glittering units under 
the searching gaze of greater refractors and reflec- 
tors. Parsonstown has done wonders. This en- 



i 9 4 THE STARS OF GOD. 

courages us to think that still further telescopic 
improvement will show the stellar character of 
other cloud-like celestial objects to which this 
character is still stoutly refused by some. 

But the telescope is not the only finder of 
clusters. The spectroscope is even more power- 
ful. It can out-travel and out-search the best 
object glass or speculum that ever went hunting 
through the spaces. Rosse's great mirror is but an 
infant to it. And it has shown that some 4000 
cloudlets on which our telescopes make no impres- 
sion as analysts are really clusters of stars ; for it 
gets from them the continuous spectrum of solids 
or liquids. And, though another 4000 cloudlets 
give the bright-lined spectrum of gases, this does 
not prove that even they do not consist of separate 
stars, because some separate stars (for example, 
those in the Trapezium of Orion) also give the 
gaseous spectrum. Men sometimes lose their char- 
acter by going into society ; not so the stars. 

The islands in the ocean, while showing a gen- 
eral tendency to roundness, give us specimens of 
almost every form and internal aspect. It is so 
with our cities. Generally roundish and densest 
toward the centre they yet appear in every variety 
of shape and apparent structure. They are oval, 
square, crescent, fan-shaped, ring-shaped (parks in 



SOLAR COM 'MUX J TIES. 195 

the middle and elsewhere), irregular beyond de- 
scription. Ancient cities ended abruptly with 
walls, and all was vacuity beyond. Modern cities 
are apt to pass out gradually into straggling- 
suburbs : now the densest part has this shape and 
now it has that, now it is here and now it is there. 
The same variety is found among the island- 
cities of the stars. Some are accurately globular ; 
most of them are roundish, with stars compacted 
most toward the centre and thinning away gradu- 
ally toward the edges where they are sparsely 
sown ; but we have specimens of almost every 
conceivable form and internal aspect. Thus, in 
the cluster known as 30 Doradus, the nucleus ap- 
pears as a rough silver backbone, with strong- 
spurs from either side, in the midst of an assem- 
blage of scattered stars spread out like wings. 
Also, the Crab Cluster in Taurus is named from 
the fact that the bright streams of condensation 
were supposed to resemble a crab. The astro- 
nomical fathers might have found a more dignified 
comparison ; but the people who had the naming 
of things in the sky did not stop for trifles. 

This variety of shape and structure does not 
show the absence of law and order among the sky- 
cities whose houses and palaces are suns ; but it 
does show that the Supreme knows how to make a 



i 9 6 THE STARS OF GOD. 

host of celestial families dwell harmoniously to- 
gether under a wide variety of conditions. The 
government of cities is the problem of our civili- 
zation, and a hard one. We cannot boast of our 
success in dealing with it. Our New Yorks and 
Chicagos are not as well regulated as they might 
be, if we may trust the outcry against them. 
There would be no call for outcry were they as 
well governed as are those great celestial cities 
above us where God is the Mayor, Common 
Council, and Board of Aldermen. 

How far away are the stellar clusters ? This is 
one of the many questions which we cannot as yet 
definitely answer. No parallax of any cluster has 
yet been found. If none can be found, then the 
nearest is farther away than Capella whose light 
comes to us in about seventy years : and the 
most remote, viz., those just brought to view by 
the most powerful instrument, must be enormously 
farther away. 

As to the number of suns contained in some of 
these clusters — it can afford comparison with the 
census of the greatest modern cities. Some, cover- 
ing only about one-tenth of the space on the sky 
occupied by our moon, and near enough to be 
resolvable by small telescopes, contain not far 
from 20,000 suns each : how much sweater must 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 197 

be the number in those clusters that are barely 
resolved by our largest telescopes, and yet cover 
several times as much space on the vault as does 
the moon ! There must be millions, on millions in 
each of them. 

And how enormous must be the spaces occupied 
by such metropolitan clusters ? If each of the 20,- 
000 suns of the cluster in Hercules is, on the aver- 
age, as far from its nearest neighbor as we are 
from the nearest star, the diameter of the cluster 
would be about thirty times the distance of Alpha 
Centauri from us. If this cluster were carried 
away 500 times its present distance, its apparent 
size would be only one 25,000th part of the moon's 
disc ; and only one 250,000th part of the size of 
some of the resolved clusters. 

The stars in these mighty swarms, being more 
widely separated from other stars than they are 
from one another, of course form as many systems 
by themselves ; in each of which all the stars are 
moving about a common centre of gravity as well 
as about, it maybe, a hundred other sub-centres of 
revolution. None of these revolutions, however, 
have been detected. How could they, at distances 
so tremendous that the sun might move thousands 
of millions of miles without seeming to move at 
all ? The time, however, mav come when a com- 



198 THE STARS OF GOD. 

parlson of photographic charts made at very long 
intervals will reveal changes. Centuries will go 
and discoveries will come. The march of time 
will show the march of stars within clusters and 
the march of clusters themselves. The force of 
gravity must keep everything in the heavens on 
the move. 

In this respect the itinerant cities in the heavens 
differ from cities on the earth. The latter are 
fastened to one spot. They never go on pilgrim- 
age. Transference is to them destruction. Old 
Tyre may become New Tyre, Thebes may become 
Memphis and Memphis become Cairo, but it is 
only by passing through the jaws of dissolution. 
But the celestial cities that from age to age seem 
to occupy precisely the same place are really 
locomotive beyond anything seen on earth. We 
have seen cities lifted to a drier level ; have seen 
single buildings, in a somewhat ragged state, 
creeping along our streets to a new site ; but we 
have never seen, and never will see, Jerusalem 
transferred to Chicago. 

Most cities look well at a distance. In the con- 
fused mass of structures that meets the eye the 
ugly and mean fail to appear, while over all tower 
the domes and spires of temples and palaces, 
perhaps warm and golden in the glow of a setting 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 199 

sun. Celestial eities also look well at our distance. 
Some of them could hardly look better. It is not 
easy to imagine in them anything unworthy or 
even common place. The magnificence is so pure, 
so sweet, so intense, so overflowing. Look, for ex- 
ample, at the Clusters in Capricornus, Libra, 
Perseus, and especially at that in Hercules. It is 
•visible as a faint haze to the naked eye, appears as 
a small round comet to a small telescope, but in a 
powerful instrument breaks up into thousands of 
stars running up into a blaze at the centre. This 
is the Cluster on which, as seen in his great reflec- 
tor, Sir William Herschel went into ■ a sort of 
astronomical rapture. He describes himself as 
almost leaping with wonder and delight as the 
glorious spectacle burst upon him. And he a 
gray-beard and a philosopher to boot! And yet, 
no one who has seen under favorable circum- 
stances that blazing city of God, would have 
blamed the venerable philosopher if he had actu- 
ally done what he was sorely tempted to do. 

Two of the clusters just mentioned are globular 
— are accurately round and their light gradually 
increases toward the centre as it would do if the 
stars were pretty equally distributed through a 
globular space. Another globular cluster (47 Tou- 
cani) of great splendor was observed by Sir John 



2oo THE STARS OF GOD. 

Herschel in the Southern Hemisphere. He wrote 
of it : "A stupendous object — a most magnificent 
globular cluster, completely insulated, upon a 
ground of the sky perfectly black." A mighty 
orb of gems of a pale rose color, all by itself in a 
deserted sky— an unruined Palmyra! 

In the case of the binary and multiple stars the 
orbits are very elliptical, resembling those of 
comets. This fact is not yet well explained by 
the nebular hypothesis. But a still greater diffi- 
culty is found in the globular clusters. Of course, 
in such a cluster the orbits about a common cen- 
tre must have to one another every degree of 
inclination ; and, indeed, whatever solid form a 
cluster may have its orbits must be very far from 
lying all in one plane. How can this be reconciled 
with the notion that the worlds in each cluster 
have all sprung from one central rotation ? Sir 
John Herschel called attention to this in the fol- 
lowing words : 

'' If the theory (nebular) be regarded as receiv- 
ing the smallest support from any observed 
numerical relations which actually hold good 
among the elements of the planetary orbits, I beg 
leave to demur. Assuredly it receives no support 
from the observation of the effect of siderial ag- 
gregation as exemplified in the formation of 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 201 

globular and elliptic clusters. For we see this 
cause, working out in thousands of instances, to 
have resulted not in the formation of a single 
large central body surrounded by a few smaller 
attendants disposed in one plane around it, but in 
systems of infinitely greater complexity consisting 
of multitudes of nearly equal luminaries grouped 
together in solid globular or elliptic forms." 



XIV. 
Solar Communities— III. 



STATES. 
EMPIRES. 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 205 

XIV. 

SOLAR COMMUNITIES-III. 

STATES EMPIRES. 

Our terrestrial cities are found combined into 
States and Empires. Several populous centres, 
with boroughs and villages and hamlets and sol- 
itary homes interspersed, form one political sys- 
tem, subject to one central government, and 
separated from other similar systems by distinct 
boundaries. 

In like manner several clusters of stars, with 
intermediate spaces occupied by stars in groups 
and multiples and units, are set in a single stellar 
system, under one central control, bound to "stand 
or fall together," and parted by well defined 
frontiers from other like systems. Let us call it a 
celestial empire. We shall find it large enough, 
and glorious enough, to deserve the name. Its 
clusters are celestial cities, while its groups of 
various grades are celestial boroughs and villages 
and hamlets .sprinkled about with country homes. 



2o6 THE STARS OF GOD. 

In such a celestial empire, located far away, 
we would expect that sometimes nothing would 
appear to us save the clusters — the great con- 
densed populous centres. Distance would com- 
pletely quench the feebler intermediate illumina- 
tion. It would be as when we look at the map of 
an earthly country reduced to a small scale. All 
the small places have disappeared. Nothing is 
seen but the larger cities. But we know that, 
between the New Yorks and Philadelphias and 
San Franciscos, lie concealed immense populations 
in thousands of smaller communities and in the 
scattered homes of mountain and forest and. 
prairie. Other maps on a larger scale will show 
us smaller places ; but none will show us every 
lonely farmhouse, or even every hamlet, in the 
whole broad land, from ocean to ocean. 

So we should expect that great celestial em- 
pires, reduced to a small scale by distance, would 
sometimes show us only a number of clusters in 
a neighborhood by themselves. Such cases are 
actually found. If these remote empires could be 
set in motion toward us the spaces between the 
clusters would gradually brighten, and at last we 
should see them populous with stars, solitary or in 
groups. We know it would be so, for the same 
change in appearance takes place as we succes- 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 207 

sively enlarge the telescope brought to bear on 
them. 

I say that such is the result in some cases. Still, 
in other cases, the result does not follow. We 
enlarge our instruments till they pierce the spaces 
like the immense refractor at Mt. Hamilton or 
even the immenser reflector at Birr Castle, and 
yet the black vacancies between the clusters give 
no sign of being peopled. Plainly they are not 
peopled. There are no intermediate groups and 
scattered stars. We have celestial cities only, 
composing our celestial empire. It is with some 
great states above as it anciently tended to be 
with all states below. For greater security men 
once gathered their homes in walled towns. From 
these they went forth to their farms in the morn- 
ing and to them returned as evening drew on. 
The country side was almost empty of habitations. 
Away on the frontiers of history we see scarcely 
anything but Babylons and Ninevehs, Thebes' and 
Memphises; and no wonder, for there was little 
else to be seen. 

We have found satellites in groups, planets in 
groups, suns in groups, and sun-groups in those 
still larger groups which we call clusters. This 
principle of organization, we would naturally ex- 
pect to find continued. We should expect that 



2o8 THE STARS OF GOD. 

clusters themselves would often appear in groups. 
And so they do — in groups of two and three and 
four and more, up to hundreds. In some of these 
the clusters are widely apart, while in others they 
crowd closely together and are seemingly con- 
nected by nebulous isthmuses. Sometimes one 
cluster seems partly to overlap another ; as would 
happen if one were partly between us and the 
other and so visually projected on it. In very 
many cases the different clusters so run together 
that the whole appear as one continuous bed of 
stars, only with several centres of special conden- 
sation — very much as certain neighboring cities 
we know of would appear to a bird's-eye view, and 
as would all the cities of some densely populated 
empire that we can imagine. In short, there is 
about the same variety as to number, size, shape, 
and relative position of the clusters composing a 
celestial empire as there is of the cities composing 
a terrestrial. The cities of terrestrial empires are 
of all sizes, from Londons downward. They are, 
or have been, of all numbers from two to thou- 
sands. They lie thousands of miles apart, or snug 
up to one another as do Xew York and Brooklyn. 
Brooklyn bridge first appeared in the skies, and 
the shining model is considerably stronger and 
more durable than the copy. 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 209 

Of the hundreds of examples of grouped clus- 
ters that might be named, most would be scarcely 
more than names. They are so remote from us, 
we have to deal with them at so long a range, 
that our astronomical artillery, however skillfully 
plied, can bring down scarcely more than their 
position and compound character. So we will 
confine our attention to a few leading examples of 
the more interesting sort — beginning with some 
in which the clusters are in such close juxtaposi- 
tion to one another that they are commonly 
reckoned as one cluster. 

In the constellation Vulpecula is a cluster called 
the Dumb Belh from its resemblance to a dumb 
bell. It really consists of two clusters joined to 
each other by a bridge of stars. It is easy to see 
from the shape of this compound cluster that each 
extreme of it must have its own centre of revolu- 
tion, while both extremes must revolve about a 
common centre. 

Another compound cluster is the Crab Cluster in 
Taurus, This cluster, like that just mentioned, 
for a time resisted analysis by the telescope, but 
has at length been resolved into stars. It consists 
of an oblong cluster to which on both sides are 
attached a number of nearly parallel streamers — 
the whole somewhat resembling a crab. The 
14 



210 THE STARS OF GOD. 

streamers in some instances seem but feebly con- 
nected with the main cluster ; some are nearly 
equal to it in length ; and all of them are distinctly 
separated from one another. Each of these wisps 
or jets or spurs of stars must be of immense 
length, and have its own centre of revolution as 
well as one common to all of them and the main 
cluster. So the whole object must be astronomi- 
cally plural. A city on earth can send out jets of 
population in any direction and to any length and 
yet the whole remain but one city. Not so a 
cluster. A river of suns, projected from the main 
cluster beyond a certain near point, would infalli- 
bly set up in business on its own account and 
establish for itself a new sub-centre of revolution, 
without forsaking the old. 

The ring cluster in Lyra. This is one of several 
annular nebulae, and easily chief of them all for 
size and beauty. Though giving the gaseous 
spectrum, it has been partly resolved into stars by 
the great telescope of the Earl of Rosse. Under 
this telescope it appears as a crown studded and 
fringed with jewelled points ; and within the 
crown appear several distinct streams of light. 
We have here a ring cluster inclosing several 
stream -like clusters. 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 211 

A famous object is the great nebula in Androm- 
eda. It is faintly visible to the naked eye. Un- 
der the telescope it appears as a group of six or 
seven nebulae of round or lenticular forms ; but, as 
given by the more searching camera, it alters 
much in appearance, though without losing its 
composite character. We now see a vast and 
extremely elliptical central body, somewhat mot- 
tled as by various centres of condensation ; and 
around it appear to stretch two or more concen- 
tric rings. On opposite sides of the rings and at 
a considerable distance from them are two small 
round nebulae of about the same order of bright- 
ness. This compound nebula is thought by some 
to have been resolved into stars by the telescope. 
Others deny this ; but we must still regard the 
nebula as a compound cluster because it gives the 
continuous spectrum. The fact that, though just 
visible to the naked eye, it requires the most pow- 
erful of telescopes to show it doubtfully as a 
cluster, shows that it must be a very brilliant as 
well as remote object. Also very large. 

But there is a far larger and more noted nebula 
than that in the girdle of Andromeda — also one 
that seems to be a group of clusters. I mean the 
great nebula in Orion. It covers several square 
degrees of the sky, and is by far the most striking 



2i2 THE STARS OF GOD. 

nebula in the northern hemisphere. It is very- 
irregular in form ; consists of numerous white 
patches of all shapes, connected with one another 
by bridges and isthmuses. Under the largest 
instruments, we have a large central nucleus that 
sends out many spiral streams and fan- like ap- 
pendages, while at one side appear patches not 
connected with the main body. That it is a com- 
pound object is certain : that it is a compound 
cluster actually analyzed by the telescope has been 
repeatedly announced and as often contradicted ; 
that it consists, in part at least, of stellar clusters 
seems decided by the fact that a faint continuous 
spectrum has been seen in connection with its 
gaseous spectrum, while this last belongs to some 
undoubted clusters and separate stars. While 
looking at the " dark lanes and coal sacks " that 
divide up the nebula in all directions, it is easy to 
regard them as the vacancies between stellar 
swarms closely grouped, but still swarms having 
so much individuality that each must have its own 
centre of revolution as well as one common to the 
whole group. 

Whirlpools on the earth are not as many as they 
once were. Where are Scylla and Charybdis ? 
Where the mighty vortex made when great 
Atlantis suddenly sank in mid ocean ? Where 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 213 

the terrible Maelstrom on the coast of Norway 
that frightened the geographical babes of the last 
generation ? Even Hell Gate, to whose far-reach- 
ing suction the sailors of New Amsterdam gave 
such wide berth, is among the missing. All the 
Vortices (including those of Descartes) seem to 
have been translated and set up among the con- 
stellations. The nebula in the sword of Orion, 
just spoken of, has in parts something of the 
whirlpool look. But there are several other 
nebulse which have this look throughout, and so 
go by the name of the spiral or whirlpool nebulae. 
These, for the most part, give the continuous 
spectrum, and so are to be considered clusters. 
But they are compound clusters. One in the 
Triangle shows at least five distinct centres of 
condensation ; another in Ursa Major shows a 
dozen or more ; another in Leo is like two slender 
cones, built of concentric layers and set base 
toward base on opposite sides of a system of con- 
centric rings inclosing a cluster — the whole resem- 
bling somewhat a gigantesque and arabesque 
unstrung bow fit for giant Orion himself. But 
the most striking example is what is known as the 
Whirlpool Nebula of Lord Rosse. This is in Canes 
Venatici. It shows conspicuously two round clus- 
ters ; and to the lareer of these are attached. 



2i 4 THE STARS OE GOD. 

generally very feebly, many clusters, distinctly 
separated from one another, in the form of 
streamers that seem to issue from it in jets and 
torrents of suns, and then to be driven about it as 
the long- tresses of a woman in a gale might be 
blown about her head. In addition to these swirls 
of clusters there are several straight ones. The 
whole aspect suggests a celestial empire of vast 
complexity whose multitudinous sub-centres of 
revolution are carried about one common gravity- 
centre of the whole. 

It is common, now, to assume that nebulae giv- 
ing the bright-lined spectrum are not clusters 
of stars, but vast continuous masses of gas not 
yet individualized into suns. Of course there may 
be such gaseous masses in the distant heavens, 
since we know some in the Solar System in the 
form of comets and meteor-swarms (these, how- 
ever, are not self luminous) ; but it is certain that 
the gaseous spectrum given by certain nebulae 
does not prove that they are not clusters ; for it is 
admitted that some resolved clusters and separate 
stars do the same. What is shown is merely that, 
if the nebula is a cluster, its separate stars are gas- 
eous. In this state of the case we are entitled to 
assume that at least a proportion of the nebulae in 
a large group of them are clusters, though giving 
the bright-lined spectrum. 



XV. 

Solar Communities— IV 

SPECIMEN EMPIRE. 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 217 



IV. 

SOLAR COMMUNITIES-IV. 

SPECIMEN EMPIRE. 

But can we not do better than this ? Have we 
no example of a celestial empire so near to us, and 
so familiar to both optical instruments and the 
naked eye, as to throw a flood of light on the struc- 
ture and condition of those brother empires whose 
banners and coats of arms are only just visible in 
our mightiest instruments, and whose remoteness 
from us dwarfs them into mystery and almost into 
practical non-existence ? 

We can answer in the affirmative. Fortunately, 
we find ourselves placed in the very midst of such 
an empire; and can closely examine it as a specimen 
of the more distant firmaments. I mean the 

MILKY WAY. 

The faintly luminous band across the sky which 
goes by this name, and with which everj'body, 
from Adam downward, has been familiar, has been 
found to be not only a vast congregation of stars 
but a congregation of clusters. Hundreds of clus- 



218 THE STARS OF GOD. 

ters are found in it; and between and around these 
are all grades of stellar groups, down to stars that 
seem like hermits amid deserts of space. And the 
whole glorious aggregation of worlds is a system 
by itself. It has distinct boundaries. It is really 
an island with vast unoccupied stretches of space 
all around it. Astronomers differ among them- 
selves as to some features of this island; but not 
as to its being an island subject to one central con- 
trol. 

Now let us state what is known, or reasonably 
conjectured, of this specimen celestial empire — 
with its mighty cities, its populous boroughs, its 
radiant towns and villages and hamlets, its lonely 
homes gleaming far away from neighbors among 
the solitudes of the celestial country-side. 

To the naked eye the Milky Way looks like a 
ragged whitish belt, passing completely around the 
sky, so as to divide it into two nearly equal hemi- 
spheres. At a certain point this belt parts into 
two streams which, after remaining apart for nearly 
half its course, come together again. Under our 
telescopes all parts of the zone break up into 
throngs of stars: as our instruments sweep away 
to the right or left, the dense masses thin away 
gradually into separate stars which at last come 
to be few and far between — like the angel visits of 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 219 

which we have heard, and in which we ought so 
heartily to believe. Though brighter at some 
points than at others, and generally brighter in the 
Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern, yet, 
on the whole and considering all circumstances, 
the belt appears not very uneqally luminous in all 
parts of the heavens; while to the right and left of 
it the scattered stars appear in about equal num- 
bers. 

Now for an hypothesis — that mysterious and won- 
derful thing that plays so conspicuous a part in 
modern researches! Yes, an hypothesis is the first 
thing to be looked up when we come across any- 
thing on earth or in the heavens that needs expla- 
nation. Whether in politics or science or religion, 
the only recognized way out of difficulties in these 
days is to get an hypothesis, a sufficient hypothe- 
sis, the only sufficient hypothesis; to work upon 
them. In the present case. Sir William Herschel 
has gotten the start of us and made ready to our 
hand an hypothesis which, for a hundred years, has 
had the general assent of astronomers as being the 
sufficient, and the only sufficient explanation of 
those aspects of the Milky way which I have just 
mentioned. And here it is. 

Let us suppose that we are situated not very far 
from the centre of a bed of stars having roughly 



2 2o THE STARS OF GOD. 

the shape of a grindstone, whose thickness is much 
less than its length — a grindstone deeply cloven 
along nearly half its round, into two equal parts 
which are set at a small angle to each other. In 
that case we should see a Milky Way in our sky 
having precisely the same features we now notice. 
Accordingly, astronomers now generally allow that 
the supposition is a picture, in a rough way, of the 
actual fact, and that all the separate stars visible 
throughout the entire heavens must belong to our 
Milky Way system. 

So much for the general shape of our Empire — 
which is agreed to all the more readily because we 
find almost its exact duplicate, cleavage and all, in 
a nebula near the tail of Ursa Major. 

What is the size of our empire? An evident way 
of approximating to this would be to look off at 
right angles to the general plane of the Milky 
Way with gradually increasing telescopic powers, 
and notice at what power new stars cease to 
appear: we then have reached the frontier in that 
direction. Doing the same in the direction of the 
length, we have reached the frontier in that direc- 
tion. On comparing these two frontier -powers we 
have the ratio of the thickness of the stratum to 
its length. This ratio the elder Herschel, making 
careful soundings through the stellar deeps, esti- 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 221 

mated to be as 1 to 22. It remains to get some 
idea of the absolute value of the unit representing 
the half -thickness of the stratum. This value he 
estimated at 40 times the distance from us of stars 
of the first magnitude. But astronomers now 
reckon this distance to be, on the average, about 
15 years of light- travel. This makes the thickness 
about 1,200 years and its length 26,000. 

These views of the elder Herschel are now ques- 
tioned. While all astronomers believe that our 
stellar empire has its boundaries, and that its 
length greatly exceeds its thickness, some will 
have it that it has never yet been seen through in 
any direction, that our most powerful telescope, 
that carries the sight 500 times deeper into space 
than the naked eye penetrates (that is 60,000 years 
of light travel) has not yet reached the lateral 
frontier, much less the rim of our celestial grind- 
stone. This makes its whole length at least 120,- 
000 years — which means that, if a ray of light were 
to start this moment from the frontier and pro- 
ceed diametrically across at a steady pace of 1 86,- 
000 miles a second, it would take a small eternity 
to reach the other side. Whatever modifications 
in such figures future researches may make, they 
are not likely to leave our celestial empire appre- 
ciably less astounding in the extent of its territory. 



222 THE STARS OF GOD. 

As to the number of stars contained in this vast 
territory, we are in very much the same situation 
as we are in with reference to the population of 
our world. The estimates of experts differ greatly. 
Some tell us that 800 millions will sum up all lands: 
others affirm almost double this number. Some 
will have it that China alone contains 600 millions; 
while others say this estimate is monstrous and 
lessen it by one -half. And who can know how 
many people unexplored Africa contains? And 
yet we know that the world's population is im- 
mense; and that, in general, the tendency of 
increased knowledge of our planet has been to 
larger and larger estimates. The census of our 
celestial empire has varied similarly. It has long 
been understood that its stars must be reckoned 
by millions. As to how many millions, astronomers 
do not find it easy to agree. When stars are pro- 
jected on one another in great heaps, beyond the 
analysis of any telescope, an estimate of their num- 
ber must be very rough indeed. Some say 18 
millions — this is the lowest figures. Some say 100 
millions — this is the highest. Whether the highest 
is high enough is still an open question. 

In any view, what an immense congregation of 
suns and Solar Systems! What an enormous 
Celestial Empire! Glorious cities by the hun- 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 223 

clreds! Glorious boroughs and villages by the 
thousands and tens of thousands! Glorious ham- 
lets and units by millions and tens of millions! 
And then the radiant families of habitable planets 
that doubtless hide by the hundreds of millions 
behind the veiling gd rv of transcendent suns! 

Of course, every individual orb of this wonderful 
host, while tracing out at the same time a wilder- 
ness of sub-orbits about local centres of many 
orders, is in motion about the common centre of 
gravity of the whole system. Where is that com- 
mon centre ? Both Argelander and Maedler under- 
took to answer this question — one locating the 
centre in Perseus, the other in Taurus near 
Alcyone the brightest of the Pleiades. The latter 
view has had the larger acceptance. Supposing it 
to be the true view, now is it consistent with the 
generally admitted fact that our sun is located not 
far from the centre of the Milky Way? The 
answer may be that the space-centre of a stellar 
system is not necessarily the centre of gravity: 
and that, if the two are practically coincident in 
our system, yet both our sun and Alcyone may be 
relatively near the united centre — the distance 
between the two being very trifling compared with 
their distance from the frontiers; and the orbit of 
our sun, however imposing in itself, being a mere 



224 THE STARS OF GOD. 

nothing compared with the orbits of frontier suns. 
Our orbit, it is true, is no small matter considered 
by itself; for our sun has been moving; at the rate 
of about ioo millions of miles a year toward the 
Constellation Hercules without deviating sensibly 
from a straight line for an entire century. What 
a vast orbit that must be whose curve rounds so 
slowly at such bewildering speed! 

Such is our sample celestial empire. In it we 
find from 20 to 100 millions of suns, in singles and 
multiples and groups and clusters, sown over such 
enormous spaces that light itself, that miracle- 
traveler, could only cross them in thousands upon 
thousands of years ; all wheeling in incessant and 
mighty movement, not only about the centre of 
gravity of the whole, but also about an indefinite 
number of sub-centres, and yet in the bonds of a 
glorious order and harmony that seem to be in- 
destructible save by the fiat of the Eternal. Do 
we not see here an example of what those other 
celestial empires are which we have named, and 
seen to be, empires but whose vast remove from 
us hides so much from our struggling and im- 
patient sight ? 

It is proper to say that some astronomers think 
that all visible nebulae belong to our Milky Way 
system and are contained within it. That some 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 225 

nebulous masses, like the comets and meteor- 
swarms of our Solar System, may be mixed up 
with the discrete stars is certainly very possible ; 
and, as soon as good evidence can be shown that 
such is the case, there is no difficulty in the world 
in receiving it. But the evidence is not yet satis- 
factory : and if it were, what a leap to the conclu- 
sion that all nebulae are within the Milky Way ! 
We need a bridge for so great a chasm. Is there 
any ? 

If the Milky Way were carried away from us 
300 times its length it would appear as a medium- 
sized nebula. As yet the actual distance from us 
of not a single cluster or nebula has been deter- 
mined : but it would seem that all irresolvable 
cluster-nebulae must lie greatly beyond the re- 
motest separate star discoverable by our largest 
telescope, or its camera, and may lie so far away as 
to imply in many a magnitude fully equal to that 
of the Milky Way. 

If a cluster-nebula is at the same distance from 
us as a given separate star it will appear resolved. 
Hence, if it does not show resolution, it must be 
more remote. If that separate star is the faintest 
one visible in the camera of the largest telescope, 
the nebula must be more remote than that star. 
So all the cluster nebulae as yet unresolvable are 
15 



226 THE STARS OF GOD. 

more remote than the remotest star yet seen by 
our most powerful instruments, and that star is 
60,000 years away, as flies the light. 

More remote — but how much more remote ? A 
double star whose constituents are equal gives 
twice the light of each : a sextuple star whose 
constituents are equal would give six fold the 
light of each. And so on. If a cluster nebula is so 
remote that the light of 100 lateral stars appear as 
one, that light is 100 times that of each constitu- 
ent star ; and this manifold light is still further 
increased by contributions of rays from all the 
stars of the swarm that fill the background to an 
indefinite distance. And this is not all the in- 
crease ; for, as Humboldt observes, " the retina 
retains a less vivid impression of separate than of 
infinitely near luminous points," so that, if there 
were no blending of lateral and background rays, 
a crowded swarm of stars would always be seen 
much further than any single constituent member 
could be. Hence, a cluster containing millions of 
stars that just begins to show resolution at the 
border or other thin parts under the most power- 
ful telescope, must be far brighter on the whole 
than the faintest star that appears in the same 
instrument ; and may be bright enough to be 
visible to the naked eye (as is the nebula in 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 227 

Andromeda), even if carried away much further 
into the abyss and made irresolvable b)- our 
present instruments. All irresolvable clusters 
are more distant than the most distant star yet 
seen: and those of them that, on the whole, are 
still far brighter in the Parsonstown reflector than 
such star must be far more remote. The clusters 
we have instanced are of this sort. Who can show 
that the Herschels and Maedlers and Lockyers 
were wrong in regarding them as external 
galaxies ? Let the old view hold its place till 
a clear better can lay claim to it. The king- 
should not retire till a lawful successor can be 
found. A vacuum is against nature. A vacant 
throne means disorder, anxiety, in short, anarchy. 
And anarchy is intolerable in both politics and 
science. 



XVI. 
Solar Communities— V 

FEDERATED EMPIRES. 



SOLAR COM M I'M TILS. 



XVI. 

SOLAR COMMUNITIES-V. 

FEDERATED EMPIRES. 

Our earthly cities, with their intermediate bor- 
oughs and villages and hamlets, are gathered into 
states and empires. And empires themselves, 
especially in these days, are often federated to- 
gether for special objects. Our fathers saw several 
great European Powers leagued together against 
Napoleon. To-day we have a Triple Alliance, 
for purposes best known to themselves, between 
Germany, Austria, and Italy: also, a still more 
noteworthy alliance between eighteen distinct 
Governments against the destroyers of Africa. 
And we are hoping that the time is not far distant 
(would that it would arrive to-day) when all the 
great empires of civilization will band themselves 
to settle all international disputes by peaceful 
arbitration. Greatest and most auspicious of all 
federations (save one) — we hail the growing sound 
of thy chariot wheels and the growing flashes of 
thy torches! Will they not arrive to-morrow ? 



232 THE STARS OF GOD. 

Lift your e*yes. You shall see not only celestial 
cities, with their intermediate communities, gath- 
ered into celestial empires; but you shall also see 
celestial empires grouped together in a grander 
federation. We would naturally expect to see 
this grander order of things, we who have ascended 
through so many orders of groups — satellite- 
groups, planet-groups, sun-groups, cluster-groups 
— surely we might reasonably predict that we 
would find the cluster-groups themselves, which 
we have chosen to call empires, gathered into 
groups more or less large, occupying one local 
neighborhood, bound together by special ties of 
mutual attraction, and sweeping in still grander 
curves than any we have yet seen about a still 
mightier centre of gravity. Even if we cannot 
actually find such federated empires, we must still 
believe that the)' exist beyond our sight. Other- 
wise Nature is not of a piece. The heavens are 
not built throughout on the same plan. All the 
analogies are defied and disappointed. 

But federated celestial empires, though far 
away, are not beyond sight. What are the Mag- 
ellanic Clouds? The voyager in the Southern 
Hemisphere looks toward the Pole and sees two 
masses of luminous haze — the larger, called Nu- 
becula Major, covering a space about 200 times that 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 233 

occupied by the moon, the other, Nubecula Minor 
measuring considerably less. If that voyager hap- 
pens to be Sir John Herschel with his telescope, 
both these luminous clouds open up and become 
two vast collections of clusters and nebulae, near 
to each other but separated by wide Saharas from 
other clusters. In the larger Nubecula a power- 
ful telescope reveals 278 clusters, and nebulae that 
may be clusters: in the smaller the collection is 
less large and brilliant but still imposing, and 
near it is Toucan one of the grandest clusters in 
the whole heavens. Taking into account only 
known or probable clusters, we have here two 
immense celestial empires in juxtaposition, form- 
ing one system, bound to stand or fall together, 
wheeling in stupendous revolution about a com- 
mon centre. Two clusters in one system, and 
nine in the other, are specially noteworthy on ac- 
count of their being of about the same order of 
brightness and so more clearly in the same local 
neighborhood. 

In the constellation Virgo there is an immense 
assembly of nebulae. Most of them are only visi- 
ble in large telescopes. They lie in groups of all 
sizes, from two to scores and hundreds. At one 
point 13 nebulae appear within two degrees of one 
another. At another point 300 nebulae cross the 



234 THE STARS OF GOD. 

field of a fixed telescope in a single hour. Some- 
times two groups make a neighborhood by them- 
selves; sometimes a much larger number enter 
into the federation. By twos and threes and scores 
are the groups profusely sown through this popu- 
lous region. 

Here we have, not merely groups of clusters, 
but clusters of groups. Here we have, not merely 
a number of clusters composing a celestial empire, 
but a number of empires bound up together into 
one system by local neighorhood and the meshes 
of mutual attraction and a common centre of rev- 
olution. A nest of star-nests ? Yes. A bed of 
star-beds? Yes; and more. What we see is a 
coalition, not of cities, but of States. It is a grand 
confederation above, answering to an international 
confederation below in virtue of which the flags 
and armies of different countries come together 
and camp and march side by side for a common 
purpose. We have seen clusters in partnership 
with clusters; now we see a congeries of clusters 
in partnership (in some cases a partnership close 
enough to be called a marriage) with another con- 
geries. The principle of association binds together 
aggregates as well as individuals. Empires crave 
fellowship as well as families. Not a star but be- 
longs to some stellar community; not a stellar 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 235 

community (save one) but joins hands with other 
stellar communities of the same order. And so 
the complication goes on, in ever ascending orders, 
as far as our present sight carries us, and doubtless 
goes on still till that Universe System is reached 
which can have no fellow. 

These federated empires in Virgo belong to a 
nebulous zone lying nearly at right angles to the 
Milky Way. In this zone most of the nebulae are 
found, not continuously, but broken up as it were 
into separate camps. The grandest of these is the 
one just considered; but others of great interest 
are found; especially in Leo, Ursa Major, Coma 
Berenicis, and Pisces Boreales. The appearance 
is as it would be if thousands of Milky Ways were 
carried off vast stretches beyond our Milky Way 
till they became faint round spots in the largest 
telescopes, and were then disposed about us in 
great detached assemblages. Each of these is a 
system of federated empires. And the whole 
broken baldric of firmaments is itself only another 
larger unit of celestial organization, as we advance 
toward that last most mysterious and yet most 
certain Unit, which includes within itself the whole 
material cosmos with its unspeakable centre of 
gravity, revolution, and government. 



2$6 THE STARS OF GOD. 

I say " that most certain Unit." For, that the 
whole sum of worlds is itself a unit whose parts 
are correlated to one another in a grand harmony 
of stable movement and result, under one central 
government whose steady and potential hand men 
sometimes call eternal law, cannot reasonably be 
doubted by anyone who has fairly considered 
those smaller units which have gone on enlarging 
and ascending under the eye of science. Does this 
ascent of orders end where our vision at present 
happens to end? No logician will venture an 
affirmative. No experienced astronomer, who is 
at the same time a believer in an architecture of 
the heavens, but is abundantly prepared to feel 
that the sublime ascent of orders still continues 
behind the scenes, through we know not how 
many steps, until at last the universe system is 
reached — that system of celestial empires that is 
all comprehending and so can have no fellow; 
that congeries of firmaments that stands in its 
lonely vastness and reverently says after its Maker 
the great words "I am, and besides me there is 
none else." 

But our observation, though not our faith, is yet 
far enough from this point. The Milky Way of 
nebulae, bounds our present vision. But we hope, 
before long, to see some of those fellow systems 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 237 

which federate with it into a still higher whole. 
Our telescopes will become more penetrating. 
Our spectroscopes will sound the abyss with a still 
longer and surer line. Our cameras will send us 
cablegrams across still wider oceans, picturing still 
more stupendous continents. Our present instru- 
mental university will take on large annexes that 
will double its efficiency. Invention is already 
wide awake. Discovery is already on tiptoe of 
outlook and expectation. The past encourages 
and the future beckons. The known is full of 
prizes ; and the larger unknown cannot be poorer, 
nay, must be richer. Fame awaits the enterprising 
explorer. Riches await him. And he cries out to 
his fellows, " Forward comrades, to new conquests! 
Down with all barriers! Up with all curtains!" 
Certainly audacity is not wanting to the spirit of 
the age. And fortune will favor the brave. Faith 
in success will win it. Time and genius and 
bright-eyed hope will more and more master the 
situation. Standing on the shoulders of the fath- 
ers we shall see greater horizons. The next cen- 
tury, now just at hand, will stand twenty stories 
from the ground, and will be able to look far 
beyond them all. How far ? Certainly not to 
the frontiers of the shining hosts of suns and sys- 
tems. Ah, who but the all-knowing Eternal 



238 THE STARS OF GOD. 

knows whether there be any frontiers ? But far 
enough to make signal additions to the glory of 
that temple which science is building for wonder 
and worship. 

In our knowlege of natural science almost any 
amount of enlargement may reasonably be expec- 
ted with the advancing years. But we cannot 
expect a like enlargement in our religious knowl- 
edge. All the great religious facts, doctrines, and 
duties are already written in the hearts of men 
and in a Book. Both records are closed. No ad- 
ditions will be made to either of them. Some few 
passages in each may get a better interpretation — 
also a worse. On minor points of the Bible (very 
few indeed) some additional light may be thrown 
— also additional darkness. But not a single new 
doctrine or duty will, by any amount of talent and 
research, be added to that great stock of religious 
information — contained in the Bible. The advan- 
cing years will never carry us beyond the Apos- 
tles. The bruit of alleged first-class discoveries 
will come to us, as it has every now and then come 
in the past ; men will cry their Ecces and Eurekas 
to us in triumphal tones, and claim that they have 
left the old Bible far behind; but their discoveries 
will turn out to be inventions, their science fables, 
their novelties "doctrines of devils." The role of 



SOLAR COMMUNITIES. 239 

an extra-Biblical discoverer in religion is an abom- 
ination. We like courage in the explorer of new- 
lands; we have nothing but commendation for 
every Columbus who audaciously launches away 
from the coasts of our present astronomy into new 
abysses in search of new worlds; but, in religious 
matters, I take my stand on Holy Scripture and 
ask for the old paths of both doctrine and duty, 
confident that no others will give either truth or 
"rest to the soul." 

But it is otherwise in the domain of natural sci- 
ence. Any day may bring magnificent additions 
to our astronomy. A few years will be almost 
sure to bring them. And, when they come, may 
you and I be there to see and welcome them. We 
will welcome them, partly because of the intellect- 
ual pleasure, the mental enlargement, and the 
various contributions which such new knowledge 
will make, directly or indirectly, to the comforts 
and ornaments of our civilization; but, chiefly, 
because of the strong light which it can, if proper- 
ly used, be made to throw on the great religious 
truths already revealed. It will give us no new 
religious truth, but it will, to fair and candid 
usage, furnish means for illustrating the old. I 
say "if properly used." Knowledge has always 
been a sword with which a man mav slav others 



2 4 o THE STARS OF GOD. 

and himself; as well as sustain law, resist oppres- 
sion, and save life — has always been an electric 
light which can blind and burn and kill; as well as 
turn night into day, peril into safety, and the lost 
into the found. The more a man knows the more 
harm he can do. The better equipped Satan is 
the worse for the world. Would that he were an 
ignoramus, and a weak one! We could defeat him 
more easily. 



XVII. 
Astronomical Religion— 1. 

REALITY OF GOD. 

HIS UNITY. 

HIS PERSONAL GREATNESS. 



16 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 243 

XVII. 

ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION-I. 

HIS REALITY HIS UNITY HIS PERSONAL GREATNESS. 

That some persons, well acquainted with the 
main astronomical facts, never actually get any 
religious help from them is among the plainest of 
facts. Circumspice ! 

Some distinctly claim that this is as it should be 
— that, really, neither Astronomy nor any other 
science has anything to say on the subject of 
religion; that it neither testifies for nor against; 
that it neither helps nor hinders, but is quite neu- 
tral, in that great conflict between the friends and 
enemies of religion that has been going on from 
the beginning, and is waxing so hot in our own 
times. In the view of these agnostics, the two 
realms of reason and faith, of science and religion, 
are so exceedingly far apart that there can be no 
serviceable communication between them. They 
are on opposite sides of the Cosmos. They are so 
unlike in their objects, evidences, and processes of 
reasoning that — Well, what has the zenith to do 
with the nadir ? 



244 THE STARS OF GOD. 

Still others claim that Astronomy, as well as 
other sciences, has something to say on religious 
matters, but that what it has to say is positively 
unfriendly — especially to the religion of the Bible. 
They tell us that, while all sorts of scientific study 
indispose to a belief in the miraculous events 
which enter so largely and fundamentally into our 
Scriptures, the study of the heavens does so in a 
notable degree by the majesty of its lessons on the 
extent and constancy of the laws of Nature. And, 
further, they assure us that the mighty extent and 
glory of the universe as lately revealed by our re- 
searches, and the relatively insignificant place 
which the earth and man occupy in it, make it 
incredible that Deity should make so much account 
of us as the Scriptures represent; and especially 
that He should, in his own person, bring us such a 
scheme of redemption as we find woven into the 
whole fabric of Christianity. They are quite ready 
to adopt the language of the Psalmist, "When I 
consider thy heavens the work of thy fingers, the 
moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, 
what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the 
son of man that thou visitest him !" What is it 
but snatching a weapon from the Christian armory 
wherewith to assail the armory itself ? 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 245 

But there are others who, in the name of science 
itself as well as of religion, strongly deny these 
infidel and agnostic claims. The great astronomi- 
cal sermons of Dr. Chalmers will not soon be for- 
gotten. Nor, it is to be hoped, will that formal 
manifesto by 617 English scientists, many of whom 
were of the first eminence, expressing " sincere 
regret that researches into scientific truth are 
perverted by some in our own times into occasions 
for casting doubt on the truth and authenticity of 
the Holy Scriptures." Such men cannot allow that 
the Nature that speaks so eloquently to every other 
point of the compass becomes dumb as soon as it 
faces religion. If at no other time, Memnon must 
sound when he faces the sunrising. Much less can 
they allow that Astronomy and the Book are two 
opposite poles that defy and exasperate each other. 
On the contrary, they maintain that the two are 
mutually friendly and helpful in a high degree. 
" The undevout astronomer is mad" was the feel- 
ing of Kepler and Newton and Sir John Herschell; 
and it is still the feeling of not a few intelligent 
gazers at the heavens. They allow that the two 
fields are not exactly coterminous, that at certain 
points there is considerable interval between them; 
but they contend that they are always within speak- 
ing distance of each other, that they are always 



246 THE STARS OF GOD. 

connected by by-ways and highways, if not by 
Milky Ways, that even as worlds throw light on 
other worlds across vast spaces, and sciences illus- 
trate other sciences though differing as much as 
physics and metaphysics, even so does Astronomy 
shed light on Religion, however far apart in some 
respects the two may be. 

With these latter views we heartily sympathize. 
It would seem that no one who believes in God, as 
being the author of both the astronomical heavens 
and the Bible, can doubt that there is a subtle 
harmony between them in virtue of which they 
must on the whole be mutually helpful when nor- 
mally used. We are in the habit of thinking that 
works of the same author will throw light on one 
another. Accordingly, we believe that Astronomy 
contains very great help, not only for people 
already religious, in the way of illustrating, empha- 
sizing, and enlarging their faith, but also for those 
who are yet so unfortunate as to be unbelievers of 
the most radical type. That it has been used in 
the service of the enemy we know. That its look 
faith ward has sometimes been grim as death we 
allow. That it has made some shocking mistakes 
in favor of even materialism and atheism we can- 
not deny. That it is by no means equal in the 
religious service it renders to the Ten Command- 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 247 

ments, or to prayer, or to the preaching of the 
Gospel, must be conceded to the evangelicals. At 
the same time it is a powerful auxiliary to them 
all. Though not an irresistible friend, nor the 
chief of friends, nor a friend that does not need to 
be guided and cultivated and discriminated from 
counterfeits, nor a friend who as mayor of the 
palace includes in himself all the royal powers and 
functions, it is still a friend well worth the having 
— especially as suggesting, illustrating, and empha- 
sizing the following lessons. 

1. God is real. — Some scientists deny this prop- 
osition on astronomical grounds. They say that 
the evolution of worlds by merely natural forces 
and laws is a matter of established science — that 
inasmuch as the nebular hypothesis will fully ac- 
count for everything we find in the heavens with- 
out calling in the aid of the Supernatural, it is 
unphilosophical and unreasonable to go outside of 
Nature for its explanation. 

The Christian should not be surprised at such 
an attitude as this. The Scriptures have fore- 
warned him. These men do not see God in the 
heavens, not because He is not there, but be- 
cause of spiritual blindness — of a certain indis- 
position and inaptitude toward religious things 
which is a part of the natural depravity we all 



248 THE STARS OF GOD. 

inherit and some cultivate. Atheistic astronomers 
are such' by cultivation, and a plenty of it. " They 
did not like to retain God in their knowledge " — 
this is the open secret of their" position. Atheism 
is in the hearts of men before it is in their intel- 
lect. Like the infernal Phlegethon, after leaving 
its occult source it runs for awhile beneath ground, 
and then debouches into view in hypotheses, spec- 
ulations, arguments, evolutionisms, science falsely 
so called. 

If it were otherwise — if these agnostical and 
atheistical men were really open-eyed with healthy 
vision, sincere inquirers after whatever truth is 
written on the spangled heavens' — nay, if they were 
only soundly converted men and, as such, had 
recovered in some good degree the original bias 
toward the true and hol} T , they would discover 
abundant evidence among the stars of the exist- 
ence of a personal First Cause. Nature, then, 
would no longer seem to explain itself. It would 
be seen that blind atoms, by no possible hocus- 
pocus of combination and time, could become in 
the universe the equivalent of a Divine Framer 
and Governor — in short, that an undevout astron- 
omer is mad. 

This will seem a hard saying to some. But we 
make no apology for saying it ; for the Scriptures 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 249 

have said it before us. "For the invisible things 
of Him from the creation of the world are clearly 
seen, being- understood from the things that are 
made, even his eternal power and Godhead ; so 
that they are without excuse." If the things that 
are made, as known to the very heathen, leave 
them without excuse for their ignorance of the 
true God, how much more inexcusable must be 
the atheists of our day amid the astounding reve- 
lations of modern science, and especial^ amid 
those hugest miracles of all that shine to them 
under the name of astronomy ! Whoever declines 
to allow it, and tells us of "honest doubt and 
frank investigation ending in atheism," the 
Christian is bound to say, " The heavens declare 
the glory of God and the firmament showeth his 
handy work." 

" If the theorv be regarded as receiving 1 the 
smallest support from any observed numerical re- 
lations which actually hold good among the 
elements of the planetary orbits, I beg leave to 
demur. Assuredly, it receives no support from 
the observations of the effect of siderial aggrega- 
tion as exemplified in the formation of globular 
and elliptic clusters. For we see this cause, work- 
ing out in thousands of instances, to have resulted 
not in the formation of a single large central body 



250 THE STARS OF GOD. 

surrounded by a few smaller attendants disposed 
in one plane around it, but in systems of infinitely 
greater complexity, consisting of multitudes of 
nearly equal luminaries grouped together in solid 
globular or elliptic forms." 

This testimony of Sir John Herschel, by far the 
most accomplished of English astronomers since 
Newton, to the insufficiency of the nebular hypoth- 
esis to account for the heavenly bodies, has been 
greatly strengthened by more recent researches. 
In fact, the hypothesis, so far as it proposes to ex- 
plain the heavens without a Deity, has become so 
burdened with difficulties and insuperables that it 
no longer deserves serious consideration. The 
donkey, never strong, has quite broken down 
under his load. On the other hand, the only com- 
peting cosmogony, the Theistic, while perfectly 
sufficient and a priori at least as credible as any, is 
greatly the simplest, the surest, the safest, the sub- 
limest, the most salutary, and the most in accord- 
ance with the convictions and traditions of 
mankind, especially of the most enlightened and 
moral part of mankind. In each of these respects 
it has almost infinitely the advantage over its 
competitor. And, according to the maxims and 
practice of philosophy in other things, such an 
aggregate superiority as this ought to cause 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 251 

Theism to be promptly accepted and fully rested 
on as the true explanation of Nature. Whatever 
secular hypothesis could claim as much, would be 
accepted without hesitation by all impartial men. 
It would be considered triumphantly established. 
No scientist, with a reputation to lose, would for 
one moment think of venturing on opposition. On 
the contrary, an hypothesis so strongly fortified 
with veri-similitudes and superiorities over all 
rivals, would ascend the throne of faith and robe 
itself in the purple of all her prerogatives by 
unanimous acclamation of the Baconian philoso- 
phy, of scientific usage, and of the entire college of 
scholarly men. 

Our space will not allow us to particularize the 
elaborate adaptation of means to ends that may be 
found in the mechanism of the heavens. They 
can be found in the works of Paley, Dick, and 
many others. Perhaps the most striking of these 
celestial testimonies to a Divine Mind are the ex- 
quisite balancings and proportionings of forces 
and motions that secure to immense and complex 
systems of planets and suns perfect stability from 
age to age; so that not a single well authenticated 
case of collision between two worlds has ever been 
noticed. Millions of chances to one against this, 
without the determination and superintendence of 
a Divine Providence ! 



25 2 THE STARS OF GOD. 

2. God is one. — The presence and dominance of 
designing Mind throughout the astronomical 
realm being conceded, the inquiry arises whether 
this designing Mind is singular or plural — whether 
Nature is the work of one Deity or of several 
Deities, (possibly of a divine syndicate,) occupying 
about the same plane of being ? 

To this important question, which really asks 
whether monotheism or polytheism should be the 
religion of the world, Astronomy gives a clear 
answer — a clearer answer than we can get from 
the earth alone : for men like the Persians have 
been perplexed by the presence of good and evil, 
of pleasure and pain, of the fair and the ugly, of 
the useful and harmful, of life and death, side b}' 
side in this world, and have asked whether Or- 
musd and Ahriman are not the solution of the 
riddle. 

Large material for an answer to this question 
is given in terrestrial facts. Taking the Bible 
conception of God with its setting of related 
doctrines, it can be shown, and has been shown, 
that the hypothesis of one such God will explain 
all Nature as we know it at least quite as well as 
the hypothesis of two or more Deities, and that 
therefore we are bound by reason and the ac- 
cepted canons of science to accept the simpler 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 253 

hypothesis. But this conclusion is greatly empha- 
sized when we extend our view to other worlds. 
There is wonderful variety in the celestial regions; 
but it is all embedded in a wonderful, all perme- 
ating, all embracing unity. So plainly does this 
unity manifest itself in the celestial mechanics 
that no astronomer is in danger of being a poly- 
theist, whatever other dangers he may be in. If 
he believes in a God at all, he sees his unity in 
every part of the sky. If he worships at all, it is 
before a single throne on which sits but one eter- 
nal Person, the author and framer of all that eye 
or telescope or Calculus discovers. 

All the planets and moons proximate spheres, 
all of them, as far as we can see, rotating ; all 
moving in orbits about the same centre ; all corre- 
lated so to one another as to make one stable sys- 
tem ; this system correlated with other systems 
into a stable group ; this group correlated with 
other groups into a stable cluster ; and so on in- 
definitely until at last we come to one all-compre- 
hending system, with its untold millions of worlds, 
full of millions of mighty and intricate movements 
which yet are so admirably adjusted and propor- 
tioned to one another that steadfast equilibrium is 
secured and universal safety and order reign from 
age to age — all secured by the presence of a few 



254 THE STARS OF GOD. 

simple principles everywhere. Everywhere mo- 
tion as a mighty factor of equilibrium. Every- 
where gravity with its one law. Everywhere the 
three laws of Kepler in full sight or half am- 
bushed. Everywhere light shooting the same 
rainbow shafts from its golden quiver. Every- 
where space warmed, lighted, and governed by 
incandescent and locomotive suns. Everywhere 
system framed into system, as the parts of a house 
are framed together to make one serviceable 
whole. Broad lines of sympathy, resemblance, 
interdependence run everywhere through the 
heavens, as run the veins and arteries and nerves 
through animal bodies. 

Just as the general resemblance between ani- 
mals enables Comparative Anatomy to foresee 
what will be found in the human system, so the 
great resemblances between the different parts of 
the astronomical realm have enabled us to forecast 
many discoveries, long before they were actually 
made. 

Of course there is but one thing to be said. But 
one thing is said to philosophic ears by the voices 
that fall from the sky. With one consent they 
proclaim unity of authorship. This unity is the 
simplest and most natural interpretation of the 
facts. Such sameness of material, of plan, of 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 255 

process, and of apparent ultimate object (the fur- 
nishing of homes for living beings) is just what 
we would expect from a single author ; and such a 
single author as the God of the Scriptures is fully 
equal to the task of making all the heavens, in all 
their richness and vastness, though these should 
be found a thousand fold richer and vaster than 
we yet know them. 

3. God is great. — After we have been convinced 
of the Divine existence by immemorial tradition, 
by our sense of need, by the miraculously attested 
Revelation, by the enormous superiority of The- 
ism as an hypothesis to account for Nature, it 
behooves us to get as vivid a conception as possi- 
ble of the personal greatness of God. We know 
that his attributes are great, are infinite : but 
there is a great difference between a cloud as seen 
in the twilight and the same cloud as painted and 
illumined by the rising sun. What we need is to 
have the cloudy vastness which we call omnis- 
cience, omnipotence, and eternity, painted and 
illumined into vividness and realization by full- 
orbed, effulgent examples of the vast durations, 
forces, and wisdoms of design and administration 
which God has established in Nature and by 
which He has expressed himself. In no science 
can we find such magnificent examples of these 



256 THE STARS OF GOD. 

things as in astronomy. They are to our vague 
ideas of the natural attributes of God what the 
light of a great speculum is to the great nebula in 
Andromeda, only faintly visible to the naked eye. 

The Problem of Three Bodies is yet beyond 
mastery by our most potential science. How 
much more the Problem of Three Hundred Bod- 
ies ! That of a system composed of millions of 
worlds is infinitely beyond even the hope of the 
most audacious astronomer. And yet a glance at 
the heavens shows us that God has mastered this 
despair of our science ; for we see there very 
many such millionaire systems in a state of perma- 
nent equilibrium, all the secrets of which God as 
the inventor and framer must thoroughly under- 
stand. 

The conditions of stability in our Solar System 
— a central body much heavier than all its planets 
and satellites put together ; orbits nearly circular, 
lying in nearly the same plane, and traversed in 
the same direction — have been ascertained. This 
achievment is reckoned a splendid triumph of 
genius and the Calculus. But what human genius 
is equal to finding the conditions of stability in 
some enormous globular cluster that has no domi- 
nant central orb, and whose orbits cut one another 
at all possible angles ? This is a feat infinitely 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 257 

beyond even the hope of our science. And yet the 
inventor and framer of such a system, that remains 
unchanged from generation to generation, must 
thoroughly know the conditions which he him- 
self has contrived and established. 

A single beautiful garden may show a very 
accomplished gardener : but when we are assured 
that he has a score or more of similar gardens in 
different parts of the country, all of which he made 
and superintends, we conceive a still higher 
opinion of him as a gardener. A merchant may 
show much ability in starting and managing a 
business that covers only a single town and a 
single branch of trade : but, if we find him success- 
fully extending his operations till they cover the 
whole nation and almost every commodity, we 
greatly enlarge our impression of his business 
faculty. A sovereign may command admiration 
by his administration of a small principality ; but, 
if he becomes the head of a great empire and 
administers a hundred provinces as well as he did 
his Monaco, we conceive a far greater admiration 
of his ability as a sovereign than we had before. 
So, much as we admire and have reason to admire, 
the vast Mind displayed in the making and fur- 
nishing our own world, when we look skyward and 
find that this world is but an inconsiderable part 
i7 



258 THE STARS OF GOD. 

of the celestial theatre which this Divine Mind 
made and administers equally well, we naturally 
rise to a grander conception of Him who without 
apparent strain extends his earthly sceptre over 
all the stars. 

To establish and administer so vast and varied 
an empire as this argues a breadth and activity 
of thought of the most astounding character. No- 
where, outside of Astronomy, do we find signs of 
anything like such mighty rushes and battles and 
victories of thought and plan and skill as appear 
in the glorious systems that wheel their ordered 
and enduring pomp through the nightly heavens. 
Lo, here is One who is at home in the vastest 
affairs, whose congenial element is stupendous 
achievement, whose thoughts can go and come from 
star to star and from zenith to nadir as easily as our 
wings can go from bush to bush ! Lo, an execu- 
tive faculty equal to any emergency or breadth 
of application ! Lo, endless faculty for detail as 
well as for broad superintendence ! Lo, powers 
so elastic that they never tire, so far reaching that 
nothing lies outside of their orbit, so individuali- 
zing that the mote in the sunbeam is no more 
overlooked than the sun itself ! It is a great 
throne that looks down upon us from the sky; 
but it is not so great as the King who founded 
and fills it. 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 259 

The power to produce something out of nothing, 
by a mere act of will, means a power to annihilate 
as well as create all things conceivable. Such a 
power is unspeakably grand. It casts all other 
powers into the shade. It puts all things within 
the grasp of its possessor. It is itself condensed 
omnipotence. 

People who believe in God as the framer of 
Nature, almost or quite without exception, also 
believe in Him as the Creator of the various 
elements that compose Nature. When does one 
get his most impressive conception of creative 
power ? Is it not when he includes in his view, 
not merely the single grain of sand that he 
happens to hold in his hand, but that vast host of 
atoms which compose the shining astronomical 
realm ? Though the power that can produce a 
single atom out of nothing, by mere willing, is 
clearly quite as great as that which can smite the 
deserts of space into Solar systems, yet there is a 
great difference between the two in power to 
rouse and impress the imagination. The one 
conception gives us only the sublime in cause ; 
the other adds to this the sublime of a vast and 
glorious effect. We have two sublimities instead 
of one, just as soon as we lift our eyes from the 
dust at our feet to the star-dust over our heads. 



2 6o THE STARS OF GOD. 

Then think of the great natural forces revealed 
in our outlook on the structure and processes of 
the astronomical earth and heavens. The thun- 
ders and lightnings in their might, the winds and 
waves at their best, the uplift that sets mountains 
and continents on their high places, the fires that 
lap up forests and cities in an hour and turn the 
toughest metals into fluids and vapors, the forces 
implied in the annual output of vegetable life as 
well as in tornados, volcanoes, and earthquakes — 
these are very impressive, but not so impressive as 
the forces implied in the rush of comets and 
planets, in the fierce disturbances seen in the 
photo-sphere of the sun, in the sweep of a system 
of millions of huge worlds at the rate of a million 
miles an hour, above all in the sum of the dynam- 
ics included in the universe system sweeping at 
about the same inconceivable rate around its 
centre of gravity. What a Power must He be 
who could originate, harness, and keep well in 
hand such terrible forces ! "The thunder of His 
power who can understand !" — how natural such a 
thought to a reasonable astronomer as he looks 
forth from his Uraniberg on the prodigious stellar 
movements ! 

The idea of the eternity of God is not an easy 
one to master : indeed what being, short of God 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 261 

Himself, has ever compassed it ? But some get a 
larger and more vivid conception of it than 
others. Other things being equal, none are likely 
to get so large and just a conception as those who 
have striven with the mighty astronomical 
periods — whose thoughts have climbed as by a 
ladder from the year of the earth to the year of 
Neptune, from the year of Neptune to that of our 
sun, from that of our sun to the hundreds of mil- 
lions of years that circumscribe the ebb and flow 
of some stellar perturbations. Wider and wider 
grows our horizon as we ascend, until at last, from 
the highest rung of all, we see — never so far, never 
so far. What are the lives of men, of nations, of 
dispensations, compared with such a mighty round 
of aeons ! The great thought crowds outward the 
elastic walls of the imagination. The successive 
flights of conception strengthen our wings. We 
begin to understand what the Everlasting is like. 
Its representative is before us. Its spell is upon 
us. The roar of its boundless ocean is in our ears, 
and its surf is spraying in our faces. We uncover, 
we bend low ; for are we not at last in the pres- 
ence of the eternity of God ? 



XVIII. 

Astronomical Religion— II. 

HIS VAST EMPIRE. 

HIS IMMENSE ACTIVITY. 

HIS LOVE OF LAW AND ORDER. 

HIS PROVIDENTIAL AND MORAL GOV- 
ERNMENT. 

NEED OF FULLER REVELATION. 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 265 

XVIII. 

ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION-II. 

HIS VAST EMPIRE HIS IMMENSE ACTIVITY HIS LOVE 

OF LAW AND ORDER HIS PROVIDENTIAL AND 

MORAL GOVERNMENT NEED OF FULLER REVELA- 
TION. 

The last chapter endeavored to show that the 
Modern Astronomy sets in a strong light 
the reality, unity, and personal greatness of God. 
The present chapter w T ill mention several other 
religious facts that are illustrated and emphazised 
by the same science — especially in its latest 
advances. 

1. God has an amazing empire. — Until lately the 
universe was an exceedingly small thing, as it 
appeared in the thought of the most advanced 
peoples. To the cultivated Greek and Roman 
writers, as well as to the popular mythology of 
their times, the whole cosmos was hardly more 
than the earth : and the earth itself was a small 
matter compared with what we now know it to be. 
The stars were mere spangles or gaseous tapers. 



266 THE STARS OF GOD. 

When better views came, the heavens were still 
occupied with only about two thousand worlds. 
When the telescope of Galileo came, the universe 
became several times larger : and, from that day 
to this, by successive enlargements of the instru- 
ment, the known heavens have gone on expanding 
until a hundred millions of suns are within view, 
implying several times that number of planets. 
Nor is this the end ; though it carries us across a 
region which light itself could not cross in less 
than 120,000 years. It is now found that, by adding 
a camera to the telescope, an additional host of 
stars is revealed — especially after long exposure 
of the photographic plate to the same point in the 
heavens. This plate is more sensitive to faint 
light than the sharpest eye ; and, unlike the eye, 
can accumulate faint impressions until they come 
within reach of sight ; can, as it were, stand on 
the shoulders of the telescope and command a 
wider horizon. It is estimated that when the 
photographic charts of the heavens already agreed 
upon, and in process in several countries, and by 
more than twenty telescopes, are completed we 
shall have within our observation full twenty 
times the number of stars now shown by our 
largest telescopes. This will bring the visible 
stellar host up to two thousand millions. 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 267 

Is even this the complete total ? No astrono- 
mer supposes that worlds end where happens to 
end the vision of our best present instruments. 
On the contrary, experience assures him that a 
given increase of space-penetrating power in his 
instruments is likely to reveal new worlds in as 
large numbers as ever. One familiar with astro- 
nomical history does not find it hard to believe 
that the unseen heavens are fully as mighty as 
the seen : he even feels that it would be a safe 
thing to defy all the researches of the future to 
reach a district in space where worlds are not. 
Where is the end ? Is there any end to the 
peopled immensities ? If one gathers courage and 
awe enough to pronounce that the stellar universe 
is co-extensive with infinite space itself, is abso- 
lutely without limit in every direction, science 
has not a single word to say against it, and several 
words to say for it. 

Such is the universe, the peopled universe, which. 
God made, over which he reigns, and to every 
minute particular of which his providence extends. 
How an ancient theist to whom this earth was the 
whole creation, or the more recent Tycho to whom 
this earth was the preponderating centre and me- 
tropolis of the sky, would have opened his eyes at 
such a demonstration as we have of the hueeness 



268 THE STARS OF GOD. 

of the Divine empire ! How trifling, beyond 
speech, seems the largest earthly kingdom in com- 
parison with this all-embracing monarchy ! If 
there is any awe in a man it will come forth and 
assert itself on every fresh excursion up and down 
the tremendous stretches of this celestial empire. 

Truly, the King personally so great has a king- 
dom to match. His sphere is worthy of him. 
Thought itself grows faint in its presence. What 
panting Ariel can put a girdle about it ? What 
expert arithmetician can count up its provinces ? 
Behold an empire that never has occasion to dis- 
pute over boundaries, for it has none ! Behold an 
empire that fears no attack from without, for to it 
there is no without. Its horizon sweeps about 
everything — about everything known and un- 
known. It is the only empire that has no neigh- 
bors. We have heard of the empire on which the 
sun never sets : here we have one within which 
all suns rise. 

2. God is a great friend to busy and force fid activity 
— to an executive way of living. — The first glance at 
the heavens seems to discover only absolute rest. 
But as soon as we begin to look narrowly, and to 
get beneath the surface of things, we find that 
everything is in motion after a most wonderful 
manner. Nothing is at rest. Not an atom but is 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 269 

moving and working at a tremendous rate. In- 
cessant and mighty activity is found wherever we 
probe the sky with our eyes or our instruments. 
Every world, and every particle, seems to have a 
mission, and to be energetically and remorselessly 
busy in fulfilling it. Enthusiastic work — from it 
there is no dispensation and no respite. Day and 
night, summer and winter, the astronomical forces 
take no holiday. Some motions are more rapid 
than others ; the planet, or moon, or sun, has its 
varying rates of speed ; sometimes, perhaps, a rel- 
ative rest may be reached for a while in the con- 
test between equal contending forces ; but even 
in this case the rest is merely relative to a few 
circumstances. The centre of equilibrium is itself 
ever on the move. The hub of the chariot wheel, 
while stationery as to the spokes, is all the while 
flying over the race course as fast as blooded 
Arabians can hurry it. 

I am not one of those who resolve everything* 
into motion ; yet, beyond doubt, motion is one of 
the great facts of the physical universe. In as- 
tronomy this motion appears in great masses : 
planets, satellites, and suns rush and wheel so 
constantly and mightily as to astonish and bewil- 
der us who are so puny, spasmodic, and easily 
wearied in our action. Tell us of a single object 



2 7 o THE STARS OF GOD. 

in the sky that stands still. Tell us of a single 
world that is not traveling faster on its mission 
than any object that we can impel. From 
the speed of light to that of Neptune is a large in- 
terval ; but even Neptune spins along at an 
average of 12,000 miles an hour. In the heavens, 
as well as on the earth, activity is the condition of 
health. Were a world to come to a standstill it- 
would perish. So the whole azure plain above us 
is throbbing and heaving with vitality. Never 
was battlefield more alive with advancing, deploy- 
ing, retreating hosts. No battle ever takes place 
among the stars ; but, seemingly, all the skillful 
evolutions and scientific moves that precede a 
great battle are there. No earthly workshop, no 
mart of trade, no hive of industry, no steaming 
fleets of commerce or war, are busier at their 
work than are the shining fleets that go and come 
in the blue deeps above us. They make no noise 
about it — at least none that we can hear — but they 
are vastly executive for all that. Yet there is 
nothing that seems morbid about this intense ac- 
tivity. Great forces can do great things without 
straining: and the great careers that are run above 
us are so within the limits of sanitation that they 
can be run forever. 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 271 

Such is the system which God has established 
and is sustaining in the heavens. Do we not see 
there an example of what the All-Wise deems the 
best ordering- of things ? Have we not pictured 
there his ideal of how vigorously powers should 
be exerted, good careers run, and good missions 
accomplished ? Certainly astronomy is not a sci- 
ence that summons to repose — that says to men 
" Sleep on now and take your rest." It summons 
to industry, to struggle, to achievement. One 
feels like going to work, and working vigorously, 
for very sympathy, as he gazes away at the uni- 
versal and splendid executiveness that reigns and 
triumphs throughout the celestial spaces. The 
swift and ever rushing spheres rebuke his idleness, 
his languor, his feebleness. In them God has ex- 
pressed his own forceful nature. In them he has 
made proclamation that men should do with their 
might what their hands find to do. It is not the 
Bible only that tells us that God detests lukewarm- 
ness, and loves to see us "zealously affected in a 
good thing" — the lesson was flaming among the 
stars long before it was copied into the Book. 
Both text and copy bid us abhor a vacuum of 
energy in well-living, as Nature abhors a vacuum 
of matter. 



272 THE STARS OF GOD. 

3. God is a great friend of law and order. This 
is one of the plainest and easiest lessons taught by- 
Astronomy. Whatever else one may deny or 
doubt, it is not this. The celestial orbs are bound 
up in such a scheme of interdependent movement 
as allows their relative situations to be forecast 
ages ahead. Invisible bonds hold them to their 
forms, rotations, and revolutions ; to certain times 
of coming and going ; to definite character and 
limits of change : even what are called " irregular- 
ities" and '"perturbations" of order are them- 
selves orderly and creatures of law. • ' The 
ordinances of heaven stand fast.' Day after day 
finds the sun running his ancient course. 
Night after night finds the moon going her his- 
toric round. Every watchful observatory knows 
just where to look for any planet ; and, from year 
to year and from age to age, looks up on the same 
constellations shining away in the same orderly 
groupings and imperturbable quiet. Changes 
there are, slow changes in position and brightness 
and color, which in the course of ages amount to 
much ; but they are all the children of law. So 
the astronomical realm is an object lesson in order. 
On the earth are many things called disorders; 
many things that defy expectation and computa- 
tion ; many things, like the weather and individu- 



ASl^RONOMICAL RELIGION. 273 

al experiences and historic events, that seem at 
first view free of all bonds : but in the sky there is 
at all times the appearance, and as it were the 
proclamation, of persistent regulation and quiet 
conformity to irresistible statute that is soothing 
to the beholder. It is restful to look away from 
the " accidents" and "uncertainties" and inexplic- 
able tossing of human affairs to the immovable 
calm and eternal foreordinations that so eloquently 
speak from their thrones of amethyst and gold. 

In our time there is no disposition to question 
that, at least all physical Nature, is under the 
dominion of law. Bible believers and unbelievers 
agree in this : they only differ as to the source and 
character of these laws. The believer attributes 
them all to God, and insists that, in addition to the 
natural forces that originally came from him,, 
should be counted his own personal activity 
guiding and dominating the whole. The unbe- 
liever excludes this supernatural element from 
the sum of forces. This is all the difference be- 
tween the two. And a very great difference it is. 

The laws of light, heat, gravity, motion are all 
capable of definite statement ; are all definitely 
stated in our text books of science ; and the state- 
ments once made are good for all time. These 
elementary laws, in their combination with one 
18 



274 THE STARS OF GOD. 

another, give rise to more complex laws which reg- 
ulate the movements of the heavenly bodies ; give 
the fixed succession of day and night, the fixed 
-order of the seasons, the fixed periods of planets 
and suns, the fixed though somewhat elastic secu- 
lar equations that modify within limits the periods 
of all the celestial orbs. As far as we have looked 
into the heavens (and that is now a good way) 
order reigns — order rooting itself in law. Con- 
stancy, subordination, government, harmonious 
cooperation — these are the features that, to the in- 
structed gaze, are everywhere pushed to the front ; 
often limned as with a sunbeam, sometimes shaded 
and faded somewhat, but never disappearing nor 
becoming cryptograms. No astronomer fails to 
read them without difficulty in every part of the 
sky ; and to most they are about as evident, though 
not as alarming, as the characters which a Divine 
hand traced before the eyes of Belshazzar. As far 
as our researches have gone, law and order sit on 
thrones which only the hand of the Eternal can 
overturn ; and we are sure that future researches 
will reveal nothing different. 

Once men were puzzled by what seemed the 
erratic planets. Their wanderings, apparently, 
were guided by no law. But the law was there, 
though it took astronomers some time to find it. 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 275 

But they found it, unmistakably, at last ; and now, 
by its means, we can forecast the positions of all 
the members of our Solar System for ages to 
come, and at any moment turn our telescope on 
any one of them. Further, we have come to feel 
and to know that the astronomic Decalogue which 
rules in our system is only a specimen of that 
which rules in every one of the innumerable plan- 
etary systems that hide in the remoter heavens. 

I do not mean to say that no miracle ever takes 
place among the astronomies. Law and miracle 
can co-exist in the same event. You can counter- 
act gravity on the earth, for a little and in particu- 
lar instances : no doubt God can do the same on a 
wonderfully grander scale in the sky. He can 
cast a planet away from the sun as easily as we 
can cast a pebble into the air. Should he do it, 
there would be a miracle; for there would be an 
astonishing effect by a supernatural cause. But 
there would be no suppression of law, only the 
dominance of one law over another; that is, the 
dominance of a supernatural force, working accord- 
ing to its laws, over a natural force working 
according to its laws. So law and miracle can sit 
side by side on the same throne and never 
quarrel. 



276 THE STARS OF GOD. 

Surely, if ever there was a friend to law and 
order, it is he who built and maintains the skies ! 
They are an object lesson as to what God desires 
and proposes in the spiritaul realm. As we look 
at the delicate proportionings and balanced ad- 
justments and orderly ongoings of the systema- 
tized firmament, we see a testimony on a magnifi- 
cent scale that God cannot be tolerant of disorder 
among any beings, but has given stringent laws to 
prevent it — laws which he is bent on upholding 
and to which men will do well to conform. 

4. God credibly ?nai?itai?is over us both a providential 
and moral govenwientj maintai7is' them iii the interest of 
order and the general welfare. — It is now universally 
understood by astronomers that the numberless 
suns imply as many systems of planets which they 
light, warm, and control in the interest of intelli- 
gent beings like men ; also, that in these vast sys- 
tems of rational and responsible beings lies the 
supreme significance and purpose of the visible 
universe. It exists for their sake. The imposing 
materialism is for the more imposing and impor- 
tant spiritualism. Houses of all grades, from 
cabin to palace, are for the sake of inhabitants. 

Astronomy shows that God is intelligent and 
powerful enough to administer an efficient govern- 
ment over these responsible beings (among whom 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 277 

we stand), on both providential and moral lines ; 
also, that he is disposed to do it. For, we see that 
he is disposed to regulate, most thorough^ and 
vigorously, the physical universe according to its 
nature ; and it follows that he must be still more 
•disposed to regulate, thoroughly and vigorously, 
according to its nature, that vastly more import- 
tant universe of intelligent and moral beings for 
the sake of which the other was made. Of course 
God has his wishes and purposes in regard to this 
supreme department of his empire, as well as his 
measures for securing the fulfilment of these pur- 
poses. The only two possible systems of 
measures are the providential and the moral. He 
can restrain, impel, and direct us by various ap- 
peals to our voluntary and responsible natures, 
and he can also do it by the pressure of circum- 
stances that do not appeal to the principle of free 
choice. Whatever his purposes in making us ; 
whatever the courses he wishes us to take and 
characters to form, and experiences to have ; it is 
plain from what we see on the surface of our as- 
tronomy that he has both wisdom and power 
enough to bring to bear on us most potentially 
both forms of government. On the one hand he 
can use wind and tide to direct the course of the 
ship ; and on the other hand he can instruct the 



278 THE STARS OF GOD. 

captain whom he has put in charge. Of course, 
God will set himself to bring his fleet of moral be- 
ings into the port he has chosen for them by all 
available means. He will press our wills, and he 
will press all the rest of us, toward the point he 
wishes us to gain. That the author of a vast sys- 
tem of moral beings has a purpose in making 
them, and suitable means for promoting that pur- 
pose, and that moral and providential govern- 
ments are the only possible means, goes without 
saying with the man who has looked with wide 
eyes on the boundless intelligence and power and 
purposefulness displayed in the heavens. In par- 
ticular, what astronomer will say that the being 
who framed the orderly and law abiding heavens 
is not intelligent enough to know and care how 
men behave, and not powerful and intelligent 
enough to bring them to account for their conduct, 
and not purposeful enough to do what he can do, 
and needs to do, to best promote his object ? 

To the instructed eye the sky is too full of 
intelligent purpose, seeking its ends in the use of 
adapted means and working these means with 
endless power and skill, to allow us to think that 
the same thoroughness and efficiency will not be 
carried into the spiritual realm. Doubtless, the 
same characteristics which God displays in the one 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 279 

field will appear in the other still more important 
one. Men do sometimes, on account of their limi- 
tations, loosen their girdles and go into vacation 
as to some of their traits in minor matters; but not 
even then, unless pushed by their limitations. 
Except under stress of weather, no ship takes in 
its sails. God is never under stress. He has no 
limitations, so far as an astronomer can see. 

As to the ends which God has in view in framing 
and maintaining a moral universe, we are not 
without some hints of information from astronom- 
ical sources. In the heavens God appears to us, 
not only as a great King, loving law and order and 
bound to have them at all costs, but as the univer- 
sal Father and i?iventor. Now the instinct and gen- 
eral habit of fatherhood is to seek the welfare of 
the children. Is not God seeking the welfare of 
his children ? Is he a deplorable exception among 
fathers ? The instinct of the inventor everywhere, 
so far as we can observe, is to value and cherish 
his invention. Does not God care for and cherish 
the great system of intelligent and moral beings 
which he has invented and impalaced in the astro- 
nomical universe ? 

His dealing with moral beings, however, is not 
that of inventor and father only. It is also that of 
a king presiding over vast realms and interests. 



280 THE STARS OF GOD. 

No telescope is so feeble as not to disclose this. 
The one character must be expected to modify to 
a considerable extent the expression of the other — 
especially in the case of disloyal subjects. In their 
case we should be sure of having a government of 
mingled kindness and severity — sometimes one in 
which only severity appears ; as often happens 
under human governments, both parental and 
civil. There never yet has been a monarch who, 
however much he loved his people, did not have 
occasion to do some severe things among them. 
There never yet has been a father who could af- 
ford to be only a father to his family. So, look- 
ing into the heavens where both the father and the 
king are so abundantly conspicuous, we should say 
that, in such a world as this, severities and kind- 
nesses would be likely to appear side by side and 
hand in hand. And it would not be at all surpris- 
ing if, sometimes, the severity should so dominate 
and overlay the tenderness as to put it quite out of 
sight to such eyes as ours, and pass for unmixed 
hatred and cruelty. Nor at all surprising if, often 
individual interests should be made to give way to 
the public welfare. Governments must act for the 
general good. The man who makes it impossible 
for the father or king to reconcile kindness to him 
with kindness to the family or state must expect. 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 281 

to suffer, under any righteous administration. 
People must not lay themselves under the wheels 
of a chariot that must go on. Alas for Sisera, 
when the stars in their courses fight against him £ 

Certainly, the friendship and good offices of a 
sovereign whose faculties are as mighty as those 
which appear nightly to every astronomer, must be 
valuable to the last degree. What great things 
such a God can do for us, or against us ! There is 
nothing too great to be hoped from his love — 
nothing too great to be feared from his wrath. 
Let the conscious rebel look at the stars and 
tremble. Let the conscious loyalist look at the 
stars and rejoice. The man who can unite in his 
favor both the kingly sceptre and the fatherly 
heart of God may give the reins to his hopes 
and triumphant expectations. Surely all things 
shall work together for his good. He has found 
the wishing cap of Fortunatus. Son of the 
Almighty ! all things are yours. The light of 
morning is behind you, the light of noon is before 
you; and, even when your face is toward the set- 
ting sun, it weaves out of rainbows an aureole for 
your silvered head. 

On the other hand, defiance of God and his gov- 
ernment, or even neglect of them, is, in the face of 
the majestic heavens, preposterous madness : 
.19 



282 THE STARS OF GOD. 

while, in the face of the majestic heavens, atten- 
tion, reverence, diligence to glean the Divine will 
from all available sources, and obedience to that 
will, as far as it can be found or surmised, are 
matters of supreme policy and prudence. The 
stars, as well as the Scriptures, say, "There is no 
wisdom nor understanding against the Lord." 
Certainly, they who have the loftiest conception of 
God, who fervently desire the knowledge of his 
ways, who are ever feeling after him if haply they 
may find him, who are accustomed to invoke the 
aid and guidance which he can so abundantly give; 
who, in short, put off their shoes from their feet in 
the presence of the Infinite — these are the people 
most in harmony with the teaching of the stars. 
No other method of dealing with God is "the 
scientific method", of which we hear so much in 
these days. Whoever takes his cue from modern 
astronomy will treat all things pertaining to the 
Author of Nature as full of moment to himself 
and all men ; and will pay God the compliment of 
assuming that he is good till he has been proved 
to be bad, of assuming that he is both a benevo- 
lent and a righteous being and desires the same 
traits in ourselves. 

5. We need, however, in order to best results, 
a fuller revelation in regard to some of the fore- 



ASTRONOMICAL RELIGION. 28 



going matters than astronomy furnishes ; as well 
as a revelation of many things concerning which 
our science gives no hint. 

Among the proclamations which the skies make 
on religious matters is one of their own insuf- 
ficiency. They speak to us loudly of the power 
and wisdom of God, and even whisper enough of 
his character and government to leave us, as the 
Scriptures say, ' without excuse for not gloryfying 
him as God.' At the same time, their language as 
to the love and righteousness of the Almighty, is 
not as clear and emphatic and easily translated in- 
to the world's vernacular as could be wished. A 
conclusion that lies at the end of a long chain of 
arguments is apt to be dim. We need to have God 
affirm it without argument — thus setting it at 
the focal distance of many near-sighted people. 
We need such historic examples of his equity and 
tenderness as the Scriptures supply. We need to 
see vividly, what every person ought to see, that 
our relative insignificance in the universe does not 
involve our being overlooked, or insufficiently 
attended to, by our Creator ; and that even our 
sinfulness does not set up inseparable barriers 
between us and the Divine favor. We need a 
minuter itemizing of the divine will than Nature 
can supply. We need to know (not guess) 



284 THE STARS OF GOD. 

whether there is help for sinners ; and, if so, to 
what extent, and in what way. The heavens 
reveal no miracles. They utter no prophecies. 
They contain no historic illustrations of the Divine 
government. They encourage us with no prom- 
ises. They are forever silent as to Christ, and 
the Holy Spirit, and the incarnation, and an expia- 
tory sacrifice, and the resurrection of the dead,, 
and a blessed immortality open to all and for- 
feitable by all. What they tell us, taken in 
connection with the law written in our hearts and 
the religious traditions afloat in every land, is suf- 
ficient to bind the conscience to a certain faith in 
God and to a righteous way of living, but not 
sufficient to be as mightily impressive and author- 
ative as men need. 

In fine, the heavens proclaim the need of further 
revelation about as loudly as they do the elemen- 
tary religious facts we have stated. Silence itself 
has sometimes a loud voice. Whispers in a teacher 
are better than silence ; but strong, sonorous 
speech is better still. Chirographs, decipherable 
with difficulty by specialists, are better than no 
writing at all; but typewriting so legible that he 
who runs may read is a much surer instructor and 
a wonderful saving of time and strength. 




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